Hunter In Black
by Heir of the void
Summary: Sixteen years ago, ten months after the Great Battle, the United States was savaged by a devastating Fog bombardment, losing a fourth of its population and every major coastal city. However, the nation has risen from the ashes of this defeat, fueled by a desire to strike back at the Fleet of Fog. This is its story.
1. Chapter 1

Arestes Black sat down at a console of the library's holographic viewing system. He swiped his ID card, opened the holo archives, and instructed it to play the Second Battle of Midway.

He was, he supposed, lucky that they had one. When the Fleet of Fog's embargo hit, the United States had gotten off relatively lightly. However, a few things, such as strategic rare earth metals, we in very short supply. Combined with the loss of offshore labor markets, the price of electronics had gone through the roof.

Abruptly, a large hologram of the Earth appeared, and quickly zoomed in on the North Pacific. A series of icons appeared, representing the remnants of the reinforced _USS Ronald Reagan_ task group. With a Fleet Carrier, two Assault Carriers, four Battleships, more than a dozen heavy cruiser, and the various escorts, screening elements, and support vessels that went along with it, it would pose a considerable threat to the navy of any nation on Earth.

The in time lapse, the fleet began to sail from from the US Navy Pearl Harbor station. Following behind it at a 'safe' distance was a massive refugee flee, carrying literally hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Hawaii.

That was when we thought the Fog could be fought.

The ships sailed north-west for several hours, the warships considerably outpacing the refuge fleet, which contained most of the Task Force's detachable ASW capability.

The fleet's objective was to sail north to refuge in Alaska. At that time, there was a Fog fleet in the North Pacific to the east of Hawaii. From what Ars could figure out, his father had been planning to sail north-west until his ships were under the coverage of the Aleutian missile batteries, then break for Anchorage.

However, to do that, he had to break through the Fog elements along that path.

Just over a day passed before anything noticeable happened. Then, abruptly, dozens of Fog ships began to converge point along the projected path of the American Task Force, including four Battleship-sized vessels.

As they converged, with the odd grace that was just one of the many advantages they held over humanity, the Fog ships fell into formation. It was an antiquated pattern, one that bore a strong resemblance to a Napoleonic Line of Battle.

A short time later, arrows representing aircraft squadrons sprang from the icons representing the Reagan and her two Assault Carrier consorts.

Ars watched as the squadrons moved toward their contacts, minutes ticking past on the time-lapse readout. He knew that the aircraft, numbering more than two hundred in total, would be focused on a relatively small number of Fog Capital Ships. Given their lack of escorts and the power arrayed against each of them, the fights should have been practically one sided.

Each of the pilots was aware of this, and had presumably come to accept the probable outcome of this mission, as well as its necessity.

One by one, the fighter squadrons engaged their targets and were destroyed.

Considering its cost, the results of the strike were depressing. While each of the targets had been hit, one battleship by ten missiles and a supercavitating torpedo, the armor of the ships was able to practically shrug off the hits.

Moments after the last fighter element was destroyed, the Fleet of Fog ships launched their counterattack, an alpha strike of more than twenty-five hundred missiles.

When the Russians hard revealed their supercavitating torpedo, it had sunk nearly every weapons treaty on earth, along with several million tons worth of warships.

As the Fleet of Fog launched its missiles, a trio of _Argus_-pattern orbital anti-missile platforms revealed themselves and opened fire on the Fog missiles. Swarms of counter-missiles rained down among a hail of precision laserfire, in some cases shooting right past the lasers fired from the Fog ships targeting the orbital platforms.

The _Argus_ orbitals were annihilated, but not before they practically wiped out the enemy missile barrage.

As the American ships continued to close, they began to fire their own ship-based supercavitating torpedoes. They were emptying their magazines much faster than would be considered practical at the time, but you learned fast that when dealing with the Fleet of Fog, you went in hard and fast, guns blazing, and hoped the ship you were facing would die to your bullets.

The Fog ships would have launched their own torpedoes, but the satellites tracking the battle had no real way to see them. Now, however, the enemy supercavitating weapons arrived. Ars watched as red hit indicators appeared across the human fleet, and ships were reported as damaged or lost outright.

The _Reagan_ took three quick hits amidships in rapid succession. An icon appeared, indicating that Admiral Black was transferring his flag from the floundering supercarrier to the as-yet undamaged battleship _Virginia_.

The fleets continued to close. As their torpedoes were nearing their targets, the American ships finally launched their own missile strike. As they flew, the missiles spread out into an odd, evenly spaced grid lattice in the air, moving, excepting evasive maneuvering, in essentially straight lines.

Then, one of the Fog battleships fire its particle beam cannon, and the others quickly followed suit. The first energy weapon struck the destroyer _USS Sherman_ square on the prow and gutted the ship. As the beam cut out, the ship just... collapsed around the massive cavity gouged in its hull.

The American ships returned fire with their heavy rail guns, but once again, the result was practically predetermined. The massive particle beams the Fog ships used could destroy anything smaller than a heavy cruiser in a single hit, but the armor the fog ships had could diffuse most of the energy from a railgun strike, preventing the human weapons from dealing much more than superficial damage.

The flagship _Virginia_ was hit several times by the enemy particle beam, but her experimental ablative armor provided a measure of defense against the weapon. She was listing heavily and had lost a large chunk of her superstructure, but all of her heavy rail guns that hadn't been blown clear away were still firing.

Finally, the human missiles arrived.

As the missiles crested the horizon, the Fog ship went into active defense mode. However, it would have seemed largely unnecessary; nearly all of the human missiles were on trajectories that put them far away from threatening the enemy ships.

The engaged the missiles that appeared threatening. However, as their rays of coherent light split the first few weapons, some of their sensors noticed something... _off_ about the debris scattered from the destroyed missiles. Beryllium, helium, and other exotic compounds.

At the same time, the torpedoes the humans had launched arrived under the enemy fleet.

One of the human missiles, one that had strayed away from the enemy fleet due to a mechanical error or a flaw in its tracking, came to life, sent out a single massive signal.

The Hydrogen Bombs in the human weapons detonated.

And there was light.

Ars ended the display. He knew what happened next. The first test use of an atomic weapon against warships had shown a soft kill radius of more than a mile. The ghost ships that made up the Fleet of Fog were much tougher than the targets in that test, though, and they had no crews that could be poisoned by radiation.

But these bombs were much more powerful.

And there were far, far more of them.

Even so, most of the missiles should have been intercepted before they reached a point where they could have inflicted meaningful damage. However, Admiral Black had presented a force where no sane man would, the Fog ships, concerned that he had some special tactic up his sleeve, rushed in to stop him, and paid no extra mind to what _looked_ like simply a sloppy missile strike.

Kansas City Shuffle.

Like so many previous times during Second Midway, the result was predetermined.

Marcus West shook his head as he watched a Gravitic Disintegration Warhead struck the base of megascraper. The odd spatial anomaly appeared, vaporizing the bottom twenty or so floors of the building. As the anomaly collapsed on itself, the building, weakened by the shock, crumbled as it fell into the resultant crater.

_Fifteen Thousand lives extinguished_ he thought, watching as two more missiles arc toward the city _just like that_. He turned away.

Around an hour ago, the Fleet of Fog had begun bombarding the City of Los Angeles. From what he understood, there had been a breach in the seawall a few hours previously, and, as the city began to flood, the Fog interpreted that as a violation of their embargo.

"These, secretary, are the monsters we face." He said, turning toward the man standing next to him, the Secretary of the United States Navy. Marcus was a young man, perhaps in his early twenties, rather tall, with dark hair and eyes. He adjusted his glasses before continuing. "For months now, we have existed practically at their sufferance."

Another missile detonated, this one forming a much larger anomaly, shaped like a flattened oblong rather than a sphere, and consuming everything within hundreds of yards of its impact point before dissipating.

A bank of fog that had been hanging over the water began to clear, and a strange, almost antiquated, but all too familiar, looking ship swiftly sailed out of it.

"Their defenses are impervious." A shore battery opened up against it, sending a blistering hail of utterly ineffectual missiles at it.

"And their weapons are devastating." A white ray shot from one of the large turrets mounted on the ship, annihilating the battery.

"And they are utterly without mercy."

A series of energy attacks struck across the city. Straining his ears, Marcus could just barely make out the screams rising from the city below.

"So, secretary, would you like to hear my proposition?"

Melissa set her VTOL down in the parking lot outside the public library. She pulled up an image the young man the Phoenix commander had sent her to retrieve. She checked her lipstick, then brushed a stray strand of her bright red hair out of her face. First impressions were important, after all.

She opened the armored door of the aircraft. It was several inches thick, made of armor nanoalloys. The aircraft had been by the U.S. Military, with considerable clandestine assistance from Phoenix, as a dropship for usage in boarding actions against the Fog.

She made her way through the parking lot, into the library, and to the front desk. She held up a picture of Arestes to the librarian at the desk. Wordlessly, she pointed to one of the holo terminals.

Melissa walked toward the indicated terminal. The boy, Ars, she had been told he preferred to be called, seemed deeply engrossed in whatever it was he was watching.

She walked up behind him and put her hand on his shoulder. He turned toward her.

"Excuse me, ma'am?" Ars muttered, his eyebrows creased. Even though he was seated, Melissa could see that he was a fairly tall boy. He had short, dark hair, contrasting his bright green eyes. His face, rather handsome, Melissa noted, bore a detectable veil of sadness.

"I represent an organization known as Phoenix." She said, not entirely sure of what the best way to say this type of thing.

"Phoenix?" Ars said, "What's that?"

"We're an... organization," Melissa said carefully, "we fight the Fog." She paused for a moment. "We continue your father's work."

Ars stood up. "What do you need me to do?"

**One week previously**

"This is the new pilot, huh?" Phoenix Chief Medical Officer Kalar Holt said, looking over the images of Ars displayed on the array of screens in the Medical Station. He was a wiry man, with brownish hair and a rather nondescript face, currently set into a contemplative frown.

"Yea." Melissa said. She shrugged. "Could be a lot worse, all things considered."

"Still, hill need a lot of prep before we can use him in actual combat." Kalar frowned. "I understand why we have to have sixteen-year-olds pilot these things, hell, I wrote that rule. But why can't we have started training him sooner?"

"Politics." Melissa said. "Specifically, that whole thing about child soldiers. The Commander said that if we started any sooner, some self-righteous idiot would get it into their head to dump the whole thing to the media." She snorted. "I'm inclined to agree with him."

Kalar shrugged. "I'll start preparing his meds. When do we need him ready to fly?"

"Month, month and a half at most."

"And when are you bringing him here?"

"Next week."

"Fortunately, I happen to have the neural antirejection mix on standby. The other stuff shouldn't be much of a problem."

"Allright," Ars said as Melissa took her hands off the controls of the aircraft, presumably having put it on autopilot. "I would like some explanation."

"About what?" She said.

"First of all, you said you fight the Fleet of Fog, and nukes are just about the only things that work against them." He pointed at the logo engraved above readouts at the pilot's station. "That's not the symbol of a U.S. Government Agency, and I've never heard of you before today. I doubt that the government would give nuclear release powers to a civilian organization, but if they did, and you started using nukes, you wouldn't stay secret very long. Therefore, you must have some method of fighting without thermonuclear weapons."

"Nice." Melisa said, shrugging. "Guess it wouldn't hurt to tell you more, in any case."

She coughed and took a deep breath. "After your father's pyrrhic victory over the Fog seventeen years ago, we were able to acquire a significant quantity of remnants from the destroyed Fog fleet. We've been dissecting for the past seventeen years. We can't replicate they're tech, exactly, but we've learned from it, build weapons using recovered materials and human ingenuity that might, _might_, have a chance of facing them.

Neither of them said anything for a while. The cockpit of the aircraft was completely silent, save for the low drone of the engines. "And we need you to operate them."

They both spent a while looking at the scenery after that. After a while, Ars spotted mountains rising in the distance.

"Hey, Mellissa," Ars muttered, cocking his head, "where are we going?"

"We're going to the Phoenix Primary Operations Center." She said, as if that should explain everything.

"You do remember that I heard of your organization about four hours ago, right?"

"Of course. I'm sorry. The Prime Ops center is in the Rockies." Melissa said, "Somewhere in Idaho, I think.

That made sense. If one wanted to build a major base for a secret organization, that was an excellent place to do it. Between the massive earthquakes and volcanic activity that had followed the Fog bombardment, the population west of the Rocky Mountains had dropped significantly. There were plenty of places that offered ample opportunities to build even a massive base dozens of miles from any human habitation.

Ars felt the plane tip upward noticeably. Several lights began blinking on the pilot's display in front of Melissa.

"Sorry." She said, taking a deep breath and sitting up straight, "the autopilot wants me to take over now. We can finish our conversation later. I need to focus."

Less than an hour later, Phoenix Central Operations came into sight. It was built into the side of a mountain on a massive plateau.

In the fading twilight, Ars could see numerous large, low buildings scattered across the area, probably extending underground. In addition, somewhat more conspicuously, there was a large armored aircraft hangar, a long runway, and several landing pads.

"We build up here for a reason," Melissa said. "We have next to nothing in the way of armor that can stand against a Corrosive Warhead, but thankfully they're designed for anti-ship work; their disintegration radius isn't that big compared to, say, Enhanced Conventional Munitions weapons. Therefore, the best defense is to spread out and put as much rock between you and them as possible."

Ars nodded as Melissa brought the dropship into a hover over one of the landing pads, then set it down. As the lurch from the impact passed, Ars felt the aircraft continue to drop. He looked around, noting that the landing pad seemed to be sinking into the ground. As Ars watched, the rim of the pad occluded the ground around it as the platform quickly descended into a well-lit square shaft.

As the elevator continued to drop, the shaft gave way to an open cavern. Ars' eyes widened as he looked around. Unsurprisingly, the cavern was poorly lit, but Ars could make out several groups of sleet, predatory shapes gleaming faintly in the overhead lights. Hundreds dark shapes lay spread out throughout the cavern, ranging from pallet crate to shipping container size.

With a thud, the platform stopped. Melissa reach forward and pressed a button on her control panel, and the doors on either side of the dropship's cockpit began to open.

"So." She said, smiling, "welcome to central operations. The commander is waiting."

Ars quickly undid the web of straps holding him into the seat and climbed out of the aircraft, mind whirling.

The commander of Phoenix was right there. _My boss_ Ars realized, walking down the steps leading from the cockpit. _Or_ he thought _my commanding officer_.

Ars walked toward the Commander, stepping over the slight lip of the platform where it had settled flush with a matching one on the ground. The moment his foot touched the hangar floor, the lights in the ceiling abruptly flared to full brightness, bathing the cavern in light.

Squinting against the abrupt brilliance, Ars looked around the cavern, confirming his suspensions. Dozens of Pre-Fog fighter aircraft of various types were stored through the space, which he now realized was a hanger.

Several of the lights seemed to be focused on a massive banner overlooking the hanger, hanging high on the wall of the far end of vault and bearing a single symbol in plain red lines on a black field.

There was a large circle in the center of the symbol, depicting an upward-looking bird with wings spread, apparently rising up from a stylized fire. Extending from either side of the circle were mirrored patterns of lines and geometric shapes reminiscent of stylized wings.

As his eyes adjusted to the light, Ars continued to walk toward the commander. He was a tall man, his short dark hair and black longcoat contrasting the pale skin of his exposed face. The commander took a step forward, extending his hand toward Ars.

"Hello, Mr. Black," he said, shaking Ars' hand. "I'm Commander Marcus. Welcome to Phoenix." He released Ars' hand and turned. "I believe it's time we showed you why we've brought you here."

The commander began to walk away. Ars hesitated for a moment, then, seeing Melissa walking in the same direction, followed.

It took several minutes to reach the edge of the room. The group ascended a few steps to a raised platform that appeared to wrap the entire hanger. The commander keyed a code into a pad by a door set into the wall.

The heavy blast door silently slid open.

Ars followed the pair through the door.

_What have I gotten myself into?_

"This whole base is essentially cut into the mountain." Commander Marcus said as the group walked onto what looked oddly like the platform of a train station. "This is B Shaft. We don't use it much for anything except storage and landing the odd aircraft."

"So where are we going?" Ars said.

"J Shaft." Melissa said. "Also-"

Abruptly, a streamlined train devoid of any lights rushed into the station, stopping with a door just in front of the group.

"The base is split into several different shafts." Marcus explained, boarding the train. "After our missile interception systems, that's the best defense we can find against corrosive warheads."

"I see." Ars said, following the Commander. "And this train connects them?"

"Right." Melissa said. "The monorail network is the fastest way to move between shafts.

Ars looked around the inside of the train. It looked like the interior of a subway car from any of the major Pre-Fog cities, with rows of seats down either side of the car and a variety of poles and handrails. Ars nearly fell as the train began to accelerate, much faster than any of admittedly small number of trains Ars had ridden. Grabbing a handrail to stabilize himself, he faced the commander.

"So, what am I here for?"

Marcus said nothing for a moment. "It's best just to show you."

The group disembarked at the station in J Shaft. A few people, most of them in uniform, boarded the train, which accelerated into the tunnel as Marcus led the group out of the station.

They made their way through several different identical hallways and down three flights of stairs. They encountered several more uniformed people along the way, who snapped to attention as the commander passed.

"We brought you in just after the transition to night watch. We wanted to try to get you in without anyone seeing you." Melissa said. "Naturally, that means it may actually take until _lunch_ tomorrow for everyone on base to know you're here."

Eventually, the commander stopped them in front of what looked a set of armored elevator doors. A complex set of what were presumably security devices were set into the wall next to the door.

The commander walked toward the terminal and pressed his hand down on a softly glowing screen while typing a passcode consisting of at least twenty characters into a keypad with the other hand. The machine beeped, and the commander bowed his head down, placing his eye over a lenses. There was another beep, and the commander straightened, reaching into a pocket on his coat.

A moment later, he withdrew a long sheath knife. He pressed the pommel against the terminal, and a small hatch opened, and a pair of small metal rods bearing a small glossy black concave dish.

Slowly the commander drew the knife out from the sheath, paused for a moment, then cut one of the fingers on his left hand and held it out over the disk, allowing his blood to drip into it.

The security terminal let out a satisfied ping and the elevator doors slowly slid open. As the trio walked onto the elevator, Melissa procured a bandage and a few strips of gauze from her pocket and offered them to the commander. Wordlessly, he accepted.

_What was that?_ Ars thought as the elevator began to drop. _Blood wouldn't be necessary for a DNA test, especially given the rest of the technology I've seen here_.

The elevator descended, its interior devoid of any indication of how far it was progressing. Eventually, it came to a stop, the doors once again silently sliding open.

Ars followed Melissa and the commander out of the elevator. The space beyond was lit incredibly dimly. Ars could make out a simple metal railing twenty or so feet in front of him, and nothing but emptiness beyond that.

"Welcome," Commander Marcus said, walking forward, "to the Eladrin Program."

An array of lights snapped on, illuminating an object sitting in the center of a massive circular depression in the floor. It was shaped like a fighter jet, but looked nothing like any fighter Ars had ever seem. It was more than a hundred feet long, with a massive pair of swept-back wings mounted around the midpoint of the fuselage, and a second set of four delta wings mounted in an 'X' around the rear engine tube.

The strangest part, however, was what it was resting on. Rather than conventional landing gear, the aircraft rested on five pairs of _legs_, two pairs forward of the wings, a pair on the tips of the main wings, and a pair spaced evenly between the main wings and the roots of those surrounding the engine.

Each of the legs consisted of a short section leading up and away from the body of the aircraft, and a second, much longer section extending upwards a short distance from its connection with the first, and down a much longer distance to the ground. Each of the legs extended at a diagonal away from the body of the aircraft, giving the impression of some massive, crouching predatory spider about to pounce its prey.

"This." Commander Marcus said, "Is Eladrin Sigma 12, the fifth operational combat unit." He paused for a moment. "Ragnarok."

"Everything this organization is, everything this organization has done, has been centered around this." Melissa said, turning to look Ars in the eye. "Developing this system would have broken _any other nation on the planet_. This unit cost more than a carrier battle group to build, and is practically irreplaceable."

"However," Marcus said, still looking at the Eladrin in the pit. "We did this because we believed that this nation and species needed something built by human hands, something we can _understand_, which can fight the Fleet of Fog on equal terms."

He turned toward Ars.

"I hope you understand what we are asking of you."

"And this," Melissa said, pressing a button on the wall next to a door, "is your room."

"Huh," Ars said, looking around as he walked through the door. "It's nicer than I expected."

"We took certain liberties with the standard accommodations." Melissa said, smiling. "You Eladrin pilots are pretty important, after all."

"Pilots?" Ars said, tilting his head. "As in plural?"

"Yea, they're at other locations. Ragnarok was the only unit we have combat ready, though"

"But the commander said Ragnarok was combat unit five."

"It's the fifth hull approved for actual combat." Melissa said, holding up a finger. "The others were all being rebuilt and refitted when we were working on it, so even though it's the most recent one we've build, it's the first one operational."

"I see."

"In any case," Melissa said, turning toward the door, "you have uniforms in the dresser, and directions to the mess hall on the table. There should also be a few pills on the table, take those with dinner."

Ars raised an eyebrow. "What for?"

"Connection boosters for the Eladrin control system and a couple of other thing." She waved a hand. "The FDA would approve everything there, if they knew about them."

"Get something to eat. Your training starts tomorrow, and I'm in charge. So sleep well, Ars. I'll likely kill you in the morning."

Despite having been built near the middle of the twentieth century, the office of the President of the United State of America looked like it had never left the nineteen forties. The most notable feature of the room was the lack of any sort of computing device on the massive hardwood desk at the head of the room.

A closer inspection would reveal a complete lack of any form of power outlets, along with no jack for a hardwired network connection. The room contained a faraday cage built into the walls and floor, strongly dissuading a wireless connection.

The man sitting at the desk had, for the past seventeen years, a serious distrust of electronic devices, particularly when critical data was concerned. He didn't anything against them; he simply had no trust in their security against the Fleet of Fog. Given that he was probably the second or third most powerful man in the world, any information that crossed his desk was extremely important.

There was a knock at the door.

President Alexander Constantine looked up from his work. "Come in."

The heavy hardwood door of the office swung open, admitting Phoenix Commander Marcus, wearing his black longcoat.

"Hello, Commander," President Alexander said, standing up, "it's been too long. What brings you to our humble seat of governance?"

"I'd love to say it's the same old thing," Marcus said, walking toward the desk, "but it really isn't. I've come to tell you we've collected our first Eladrin pilot."

"Excellent," the President said, "Take a seat. Would you like a drink?"

Marcus nodded.

"Domestic or import?"

"You're hilarious. In any case, I need to know-"

"Stop." The president held up a hand. "Are you carrying any electronics?"

"No."

"Good." The president reach under his desk and pressed a button. A massively powerful electromagnetic pulse radiated out from several emitters concealed in the desk, frying the circuitry of any devices within the confines' of the room's faraday cage. More importantly, any nanomaterial constructs concealed in the room would be instantly vaporized or liquefied as the tiny machines they consisted of were fused into uselessness. "Now we can talk business."

"As I was saying," Marcus said, resisting the urge to roll his eyes as he pulled a chair out from the side of the room and sat down in front of the Resolute Desk. "I need to know our present situation with regard to the war."

"Which we aren't currently involved in." The president muttered "Same as always, somewhere between twenty and thirty percent opposition."

Marcus growled. "Why can't those idiots see that-"

"Now now, Commander," Alexander said, shaking his pen at Marcus. "We're just the military and political leaders of the final bastion of human freedom. What right do we have to question cloistered and tenured academics on matters of war?"

"Excellent point. And our status?"

"Well, at risk of stating the obvious-"

"As it happens, I do in fact live under a rock, so don't worry about that."

"Well," the President rolled his eyes, "we have four carriers on active duty. Three _Nimitz_-class, and one of the new _Midway_-class boats, plus another of each in construction, and we've got nine of the _Virginia_-class battleships ready."

"Good, good. Also, have you been briefed on the use of Mental Models by the Fog?"

"Yes," the president said, "but I don't believe we have anything concrete."

"Well, as it happens," Marcus said, reaching into one of his coat pockets, "that's the real reason I'm here." He put a picture on the desk.

"That," the president said, picking up the photo, "is not a natural hair color."

"Thank God for semi-competent analysts, then." Marcus pointed at the picture. "That's the Mental Model of the I-401, the Fog Submarine the Japanese got their hands on. Somehow."

"So what do we know?"

Marcus sighed. "Less than we would like. Naturally, we're assuming they're holding at least some of what they know back, but given that I-401 isn't actually under their control, they probably don't know that much more."

"So what _have_ they told us, then?"

Marcus took a deep breath. "First of all, the Mental Model can control its ship perfectly from considerable distance, and through considerable barriers. The maximum range is unknown, but if our suspicions about the Fleet of Fog communicating using quantum entanglement are correct, then the range may well be functionally infinite."

The President said nothing.

"In addition, a Mental Model, beyond possessing superhuman physical capabilities and durability, is also capable of projecting a Klein Field. Not only is the Model capable of using it to gain functional immunity to conventional small arms fire, but also as a form of powerful, if crude, telekinesis."

President Alexander sighed. "So, do we have anything in the way of a counter?"

"I have some R&D people working on one," Alexander said, "but honestly, the Mental Models, whatever the full extent of their capabilities are, simply aren't a primary concern in combat."

"Infiltration." The president murmured. "They look like us now."

"Fortunately, there are still a few ways we can distinguish them from a real person, Mr. President," Marcus said, reaching for his knife.

At 0400 hours on the dot, a klaxon blared through Ars' quarters. He pulled himself upwards, rubbing his eyes.

"What is this, maggot?" A vaguely feminine voice shouted in his ear. "If this was a Fog attack, we could all be DEAD because of you!"

The moment she was finished, the speaker hefted a large bucket and dumped it onto Ars.

He was instantly awake. He looked around, shivering as he frantically blinked and tried to wipe the frigid water, which felt and tasted extremely salty, out of his eyes.

"M-Melissa?" He muttered, recognizing the bright red hair of his tormentor, who appeared to wearing a full Battle Dress Uniform, "what are you doing?"

"SCILENCE!" Melissa slowly lowered her head to look Ars in the eye. "I believe you misspoke. Please repeat that."

"W-what are you doing, sir?"

"No questions. Start running, and try to keep up."

Melissa waited for a few seconds for Ars to climb out of his bed, opened the door, and began running down the hallway.

Ars followed.

The pace Melissa set was, for Ars, punishing. Though he had spent considerable time studying the strategy and tactics of Naval Warfare, he had never really put much thought into how exactly he would carry out his desire for vengeance. To be perfectly honest, he probably hadn't wanted to think about it. Most of his life, he had simply drifted; one more orphan of the Final Battle.

Now, that had changed.

After running for several minutes, Melissa had led Ars to a long, straight hallway that seemed to be sloping steadily upward. Ars lungs were starting to burn, typical for him after running. His entire body felt faintly sore, which was rather unusual, even for Ars, who had never really been particularly physically fit.

He kept running.

Several more minutes of running later, Ars was able to take a rest. There was a fair-sized room at the end of the hallway, large enough for more than a hundred people to stand comfortably. Six large elevator doors on the far wall were all that broke the monotony of the bare white walls.

Melissa approached one of the elevator doors and poked the call button. The doors immediately slid open, without any sort of elaborate security procedure. Melissa bowed elaborately, gesturing Ars forward.

"While I'm sure you won't be able to make any productive use of this information," Melissa said, rolling her eyes, "I suppose I should tell you that this is an emergency evacuation station. These elevator shafts are angled sharply, and lead to evacuation stations more than a mile away from the base."

"Yes ma'am," Ars responded, carefully.

The interior of the elevator was rather large, no surprising if it was intended to quickly evacuate large numbers of people. Ars was pacing constantly, trying to stay warm and to prevent the cold brine still slowly dripping off his sodden clothing from pooling around his feet.

However much time it took the elevator to reach the surface, Ars felt that it wasn't even remotely enough. The doors slid open a short time later, admitting a draft of cold air, chilling an already shivering Ars.

As they disembarked the elevator, walking, thankfully, Melissa bent down to pick up a large red sports bag lying against the wall next to the elevator and hefted it over her shoulder. The evacuation elevator lend into a room much like its twin underground, albeit with four exit hallways, two opposite the elevators and one on each adjacent wall.

Melissa led Ars out of one of the hallways and down a short flight of steps. There was another short corridor at the bottom, leading to a massive blast door at least twelve feet tall made of bare steel with a large wheel mounted at its center.

Melissa sighed and pointed at the door.

Ars complied.

The wheel was somewhat difficult to turn, but the door was incredibly well balanced and opened easily once unlatched. Ars pushed the door aside and stepped over the lip on metal on the ground and set foot on bare stone. He took a few steps forward, then froze.

He was standing on a large, more or less flat ledge cut into the side of the mountain. Stepping lightly, he walked forward until he was a few feet from the edge and lowered his gaze.

He was looking down a slope that had to be thousands of feet down. Somewhere below him, the rough stone of the mountainside gave way to forests of pine, which grew denser as the slope descended. Far below him was a vast sea of trees, broken occasionally by ruined settlements.

Slowly, Ars turned around and walked forward. The mountain continued upward for thousands of feet, its slopes slowly breaking away from those surrounding it to from a jagged, majestic, crown, silhouetted by the dawn.

Suddenly, Ars felt very small.

Ars was broken out of his trance by the sound of a zipper. He snapped his head back towards Melissa, who had set down her bag and drawn a long, black-bladed sword from it.

She smiled and tossed it at him.

Reflectively, Ars moved to catch it, before remembering a moment later that sword are sometimes sharp, and that he was more likely to catch this one with his face or his gut than his hand.

The sword hit the ground next to him, making a sound that wasn't exactly a clatter as landed, certainly not what Ars expected from steel hitting stone.

Ars picked up the sword and examined it. It was a plain weapon, perhaps a bit more than fifty inches from hilt to pommel, one that, exempting the color of the blade, he might have expected to see on a Medieval European battlefield. He looked back at Melissa, who had procured a blade of her own from the bag, which she had moved aside, and was now performing what appeared to be a series of warm-ups. She stopped and pointed her sword at him.

"Allright, as expected, your physical shape needs..." Melissa paused, "work. Lots of work. So, because I'm stuck with the task to somehow turn _that_," he pointed at him, "into a battle-ready and _elite_ Eladrin pilot, I've been given a fair degree of latitude on how to do it. So you'll be learning the sword. I've trained with this weapon for the past seventeen years, and it's helped me with... a lot of things." She coughed. "Now, guard position."

The lesson began.

It was not pleasant.

Ars stumbled into the meeting room, closing the door behind him. It had been two weeks since he had started his training. Apparently, the 0400 hours wakeup call was a courtesy given on account of possible jet lag from his trip; his usual wakeup call came an hour earlier.

Over the past two weeks, he had spent more than, two hundred hours in the Eladrin flight simulator, most of them being spent being blow into tiny pieces or vaporized by two hundred year old warships.

He had also been taking a regime of drugs to enable safe neural interface with the Eladrin control system, which Chief Medical Officer Kalar assured him was not at all like drinking lead paint. He had gotten violently sick twice already from the connection meds, through the Kalar said he was probably mostly past that.

They also contained a physical booster, which in hindsight explained how he had survived the physical aspects of his training. Kalar had been very quick to explain that no, these were not steroids, and they were certainly not harmful. He had also requested that Ars not play any major league sports for the next few years. Ars couldn't tell of the man was kidding.

Naturally, they quickly became friends.

His physical training, though occupying less of his eighteen hour day than the simulator training, was brutal. Melissa had beaten him black and blue with the practice blades during their first session, and she had never failed to find at least two or three hours a day, sometimes much more, for further practice. Beyond that, he had engaged in other, more mundane physical training. Running, pushups, lifting heavy objects, and various other things.

He sat down in one of swivel chairs in the meeting room and sighed. He had just had a fairly short session in the simulator, but even that had left him lightheaded.

The door opened again, and brown-haired woman wearing a Phoenix uniform walked in.

"Hello, pilot Ars." She said, walking toward the podium at the front of the room. "I'm Ellan Karolus, Phoenix Xenopsychology specialist. Call me Ellen."

"Yes, ma'am." Ars said, unsure of the best approach to take.

"There's no need to be so formal," Ellen said, smiling. "Anyway, I'm here to brief you on Mental Models that the Fleet of Fog has started using."

"I've heard that term thrown around," Ars said, "but I'm not really sure what exactly they _are_."

"Okay, then," Ellen said, pressing a button on the table. "This is a Mental Model."

The projector came to life, casting an image on the far wall of the room composed of several smaller pictures. The majority of them were of a short, blue-grey haired girl with a blank gaze, wearing an extremely stylized naval uniform. She was depicted in a variety of poses, including several of her standing or sitting on various parts of a blue submarine, on docks, playing with starfish, and a pair of pictures that appeared to be mug shots.

All of the other images were of much lower quality, with no repetitions. A red haired woman in full plate mail, a blue-haired girl standing on what appeared to be the turret of a warship, a blonde with nearly all of her body obscured by a massive trenchcoat, and others that were harder to see.

"In essence," Ellen said, "a Mental Model is an artificial humanoid body created by a Fog ship. There are a few commonalities. For example, so far they appear to be universally female, and, as far as we can tell, all possess superhuman physical capabilities. Beyond that, however, almost anything is possible, as you can see."

Ellen pressed a button, advancing to a slide to display an image of the blue-grey haired girl standing spread-eagle.

Ars raised a hand. "Stupid Question," he said slowly, "but do we have any idea why they're doing this?"

"That's actually a pretty good question." Ellen said, "But honestly? I couldn't really tell you for sure. We have theories, of course, but we just don't know enough about the Fog to confirm or deny any of them. However, since the first reported sighting of a Mental Model just a little bit over two years ago, the patrol matters of the Fog seem to have been changing."

Ars thought back to all of the reports of battles with the Fleet of Fog he had read about. Almost invariably, the Fog did little more than sail in a straight line toward their targets, Klein Fields up and weapons blazing.

He had also read reports of Fog patrol patterns while he had never seen one less than six months old, and most were much older, something had always felt odd about the Fog's patrol patterns. In a way, they reminded him of ants, following the same paths over and over again, increasing strength where they found large numbers of humans or repeated attempts to run the blockade took place.

But if that was changing, then...

"They're for strategy." Ars said, excited, "Non-linear thought, inductive reasoning, that sort of thing. The one area where we completely dominated the in the final battle. The way my..." he trained of as he followed the train of thought to its logical conclusion.

"The way my father did." He muttered, voice soft.

"Wow!" Ellan said, completely oblivious. "You figured that out really fast. It took us days to come to that conclusion."

"Wonderful." Ars said, looking at the desk. "So, you were saying about the Mental Models?"

"Oh, right." Ellen pressed a button, and a 3D rendering of the girl appeared on the display. The rendering was still for a moment, they showed the girl's clothing and skin dissolve into silvery nanomaterial dust, revealing what looked like a blue female manikin.

"So, we know that the Mental Models are made out of nanomaterials." Ellen said, pressing a button as she finished speaking. On the display, the blue figure split vertically down the middle. The two halves move a short distance, then rotated, displaying more blank blue surface.

"We don't know what the Mental Models look like on the inside though, so we just assume they're walking blobs of nanomaterials. The Fog are computers, and we don't think there would be any logical reason to make the models more complex than necessary."

**Six Weeks Later**

The Avalon Spaceflight Facility was the crowning achievement of the LFD Corporation. It was a unique human accomplishment, the, as so far as anyone in North America was able to determine, the first and only Laser Boosted Single Stage To Orbit launch site in the world.

Currently, a massive SSTO vehicle was in the final stages of preparation for launch. The massive craft was undergoing the final steps of launch preparation. Technicians, many of them suspended in midair via a variety of platforms and harness, inspected the craft beyond the already painstaking requirements for spaceflight; absolutely nothing could be allowed to go wrong with this launch.

The vehicle on the launch pad consisted of a Jupiter V SSTO craft, with eight comparatively small, but still massive, detachable boosters attached, technically rendering it _not_ an SSTO. All told, the vehicle weighed several million pounds, most of it in ablative propulsion material, as well as more conventional rocket fuel.

For three days, the spacecraft had been ready for launch, and, given their penetration of human information systems, the Fleet of Fog knew it. However, they didn't know _when_ it would launch, by virtue of the fact that none of the humans present knew either.

So they waited.

"Allright, Ars," Melissa said, pointing at the board behind her, "this is it. Your first real combat mission."

Ars sat in his chair in the briefing room, eyes fixed on the blank wall display behind her.

"We are trying to launch an SSTO vehicle from the Avalon facility in Texas. Our objective is Japan. The SSTO is loaded with a variety of materials, all of which are now extremely scarce in Japan. Highlights of the load include several tons of Strategic Rare Earth Metals, in addition to a large quantity of highly enriched uranium."

"So, where do I come in?"

Melissa tapped the screen, and a man of the West Coast of the United States appeared. It was heavily annotated with various icons and symbols representing terrain, weather patterns, and, most notably, Fog warship presence.

"As you can see, the Fog has committed a much stronger force here than they usually use to enforce the blockade." She gestured at the display. "Given the requirements to do this, we are fairly sure that they have had to draw on their forces in other areas. What satellite data we can get confirms this."

"So," Ars said, "That means they must know this is important."

They had indeed made a considerable commitment to the blockade. Cruisers, normally used to anchor the formations of smaller ships that covered the coastline, had been deployed into the rank and file, many of their positions taken by Heavy Cruisers. In several locations, the blockade lines were anchored by Battlecruisers or Battleships, full-blown Capital Ships.

Melissa ran her finger in an arc across the display, drawing a red line behind it. "This," she said, "is the projected course of the SSTO on its way to Japan, before taking whatever evasive maneuvers will inevitably become necessary into account. Your mission is to deploy with your Eladrin and engage the Fog ships here," she made a circling motion around where the SSTO flight path crossed the line of the blockade, "disrupting their efforts to intercept the SSTO and, if possible, damage or sink them."

_Well_ Ars thought, looking at the map, studying the fog forces around his target area _if Ragnarok really is as capable as it was in the simulations, if the Fog are as dumb as they were at second midway, and if I don't make some incredibly stupid mistake because I've never _actually _touched the controls of this machine, this just might be possible_.

He sighed. _Or maybe I'll just die horribly_.

"Allright," he said, stand up. "I'm ready."

Ars stood on the catwalk leading to the cockpit of the Eladrin. The aircraft had been brought up from the deep vault he had previously seen it in only a few hours before, and the technical teams had been working frantically to ensure that it was combat ready.

He looked down at the cockpit. Unlike most fighter aircraft, the Eladrin lacked any sort of canopy. Instead, the cockpit was set down into the body of the aircraft were the fuselage was thickest, between the main wings and the engine. Once he was settled inside, several layers of armor would close over him, and the integrated sensor readouts and the neural links would connect him to the outside world.

_Though once I think about it_ Ars thought, looking over the rest of the body of the Eladrin, _this is a pretty sound design decision_. The Eladrin was, after all, better protected than any historical warship. Putting on a canopy, even one made of something like optical sapphire, could potentially compromise all of that armor _without_ taking into account that in order to function it would obviously have to be transparent, and thus allow the laser weapons of the Fog to pass through it.

Ars took a step forward, then turned around and began to climb down the ladder leading to the cockpit of Eladrin Unit Sigma 12.

The communicator built into his Flight Suit came to life. Ars paused his descent.

The complex garment, if it could be called that, which he had spent the last fifteen minutes putting on, possessed myriad capabilities above and beyond its essential purpose of assisting the control interface of the Eladrin connect to his central nervous system.

"Ars?" The voice of Commander Marcus issued from the speakers built into the collar of his suit. "Once you get out there, we may not be able to contact you. The Fog have been jamming all our communications for years, so if they want to cut our channels, or listen in, they almost certainly could. So, before you go out there," The commander paused for a moment. "Happy hunting."

"Roger that." Ars said, then nodded. He resumed his climb.

The mood in the Phoenix Central Combat Operations Combat Information Center was tense. Dozens of men and women sat at their stations, completely silent. They were about to do something that no one, for seventeen years, had been insane enough too attempted.

They were going to sink ships of the Fog.

Commander Marcus sat at his station in the CIC. Naturally, silence lay thick, almost choking, over the entire room. They watched the launch clock at the front of the massive space count away the final seconds until the launch time that had been arranged in secret between the upper echelons of Phoenix, Avalon, and the Central Government.

_Am I about to send him to die_?

The clock hit T-minus zero.

All across the Central United States, lights flickered as unimaginable energies were rerouted toward the Avalon Spaceflight Facility. The dedicated fusion reactors onsite, built with technology derived from the Fog and provided by Phoenix, know to only a select few to be anything other than the 'mere' fission reactors the public was told they were, reached maximum output.

The energies were redirected into massive banks of capacitors, ones which Phoenix had also assisted in the development of. They were fractal capacitors, with a capacity more than an order of magnitude beyond that of most others used in the post-Fog world, which themselves were vast improvements over the conductive plates used in the early twenty-first century.

As the capacitor banks filled, yet more energy was drawn in, this time from across the entirely of continent. Eight beams of unimaginably intense coherent light lanced up from the launch pad and struck the cores of ablative metallic reaction mass in the booster engines surrounding the SSTO.

In a fraction of an instant, the beams heated the propellant to insane temperatures. The in an instant, the metal flashed into plasma, and was then channeled outward, and away from the laser emitters, by a series of carefully shaped electromagnetic fields, exerting a tremendous force on the body of the vehicle.

Then the central beam fired.

The SSTO vehicle began to rise, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed as the reaction mass ablated away. The beams flickered around the retreating surface of their respective targets with tiny, infinitely precise motions, ensuring the optimal use of reaction mass.

As the craft rose and accelerated, it began to tip westward. As it did so, the beams emitted from the launch pad cut out and, and instant later, began firing again from another emitter, positioned for a much better angle on the receding vehicle.

Ars sat down in the cockpit and put on the helmet that had been waiting in the aircraft. As soon as he did so, his seat slid back, retracting slightly into the aircraft. With a slight whirring sound, a pair of armored shutters smoothly slid into place over the cockpit, sealing it shut. For a moment, Ars was plunged into complete darkness, then his vision began to slowly return as, one by one, various controls and readouts lit up, arrayed just as they had been in the simulation.

Ars felt something _shifting_ in his Flight Suit, starting at the back of his head and following his spine down to the small of his back. He felt a slight pricking sensation on the back of his head, which swiftly vanished and was replaced by a bizarre tingling coldness. The sensation stayed in the back of his head for a moment, then spread to his entire body in a wave of alien sensation, causing Ars to shiver as it did so.

_What the hell was that?_ Ars thought. _The neural interface? The Simulator used the same system, and the connection was nothing like that._

The communicator came to life.

"Don't worry about that, Ars," Melissa said. "The interface for the Eladrin proper is much more intense and, um, invasive than the one on the simulator." She said nothing. Given that the activation indicator was still lit, Ars assumed she was talking to someone else.

"You aren't having a seizure, are you?" Melissa asked, as if there was nothing even remotely abnormal about that. "Most of the failed Eladrin pilot candidates had started seizing up about now."

"No, I'm fine. It's great to know you care so much."

"Avalon Prime is in the air and reporting no anomalies." The Phoenix CIC technician who had spoken looked back at his screen. "No trouble on our scopes either."

The tactical officer cocked his head as someone in his back room said something into his headset. "The Fleet of Fog has not yet made any response to the launch."

The Phoenix CIC used a system much like that employed by the Mission Control for the Apollo Missions. The Sheer number of things occurring at one time made the concept of putting everyone with a necessary specialty in one space daunting. Instead, they were grouped by specialty and stationed in adjacent rooms, and each room provided information and support to the CIC officer for their task area.

Commander Marcus looked at the displays projected at his station. He watched as the arrow representing the SSTO crept north and east across the continent, watching as the time till it hit the coast ticked down toward the estimates of the time the Eladrin would need to reach the same point.

He coughed.

"Commence Launch."

"All, people!" Melissa shouted from her station, what would perhaps be the equivalent of an Executive Officer's station. "Commence Launch Status Checklist."

"This is power systems, we are go for launch."

"Life support is a go."

"Weapons systems are go."

"Engineering is go for launch."

"Flight Dynamics is a go."

"CAPCOM is go."

"Guidance is go."

"Medical is go."

"Propulsion systems are go."

Ars sat in the cockpit, listening as the pre-launch checklist continued. The Space he was occupying inside the Eladrin was surprisingly large, more so than any other fighter jet cockpits he had seen.

The pain from the activation of the neural link and faded almost immediately, and the strange sensation it had generated had passed soon after. The feeling of the neural link, still in standby mode, was unlike what he had experienced in any of the simulators. He felt some form of presence, just behind his head, and had an odd sensation of being watched. It made sense, he supposed. Intellectually, he knew that the CIC crew had access to just about any cockpit data feed and all of his biometric data, but this was something else, something different. Something originating in his animal hindbrain, the sense of being in the presence of an overwhelmingly superior predator.

The launch checklist reached him. He closed his eyes.

"Pilot Ready."

"Commander, all systems are go."

"Commence launch sequence."

"Commencing launch sequence," the Propulsion Systems Engineer said. "T minus thirty seconds."

"Switching all control to pilot."

"Commencing internal reactor ignition."

"Reactor ignition successful."

Marcus took a deep breath.

"Launch."

The launch timer hit zero. An instant later, Ars was slammed into his seat as a massive version of the catapults mounted on aircraft carriers flung the Eladrin forward, down a long tunnel cut just for the purpose, and into the sky.

Ars marveled as his sensor feeds and displays came to life. The sheer volume and _clarity_ of data available to him was enough to set his head spinning. The simulator had been clean, sanitized, everything striped down simply the variables relevant to the situation at hand.

This was nothing like that. Six different RADARs, a pair of LIDARs, FLIR systems on all of his major weapons, and a plethora of other fairly conventional military sensor systems. There was, however, more. Beyond that, there were suites of systems designed for the express purpose of fighting the Fleet of Fog. A network of accelerometers was built across the entire ship, which, along with the arrays of gravitation traps was intended to allow the Eladrin to pinpoint the source of any sort of gravity anomaly. There were other, weirder sensor systems, too, things that Ars hadn't been briefed on. To be honest, most of them sounded more like things that belonged in a high-energy physics lab or a particle accelerator than on a combat aircraft.

Best of all, however, was the canopy. There was really no other way to describe it. The outermost wall of the cockpit had transformed into an image of the sky surround the Eladrin in flight. The display was sharper and clearer than any monitor of hologram he had ever seen, and gave him a three hundred and sixty degree horizontal view, and more than one eighty vertically.

Ars continued to fly, revealing in the data at his fingertips. At the very least, the method of data transmission was the same as the simulator. Receiving data from the Eladrin was a strange experience, one that would be rather difficult for Ars to put into words. It was a bit like remembering thing he'd never known. He would look at a vastly simplified display, and he would simply _know_ all the relevant data.

He had more than five hundred miles to go until he hit the coast. At the standard cruising speed of the Eladrin, it would take him less than half an hour.

He looked at the data feeds. The SSTO had switched to internal power and was still on course, and the Fog was maneuvering as expected to intercept it. If they had spotted him, then they were trying to bait him into a trap by acting like they hadn't.

Ars considered for a moment. Even with the Mental Models, tactical complexity of that degree was still completely unexpected from the Fog.

He stayed on course.


	2. Chapter 2

Alaska stood on her foremost main gun turret, surrounded by displays of teal-green light. So far, everything was going just as Arizona had said. The human orbital craft had stayed on its expected course, and it would soon reach a point where she would have a clear line of fire. She had been getting strange readings that could have indicated something was moving toward her position over the continent, but couldn't find anything distinctive. Nothing had come up when she subjected the data to her anti-stealth algorithms, and she couldn't get a return on her radar systems, so she figured it was probably nothing.

The Mental Model itself took the shape of a young woman in her mid to late teens of medium height. She had pale skin, bright blue eyes, and long green hair which cascaded down nearly reaching her waist, and wore a simple pale dress, a garment which was almost normal compared to the clothing choices of certain other Metal Models.

She saw a small light appear on her displays, indicating an incoming communication on the Concept Comm system. She raised her hand and pressed it to her ear, initiating a voice-only connection, which was more appropriate than full VR in what could very quickly turn into a warzone.

"Alaska, are you in place?" It was Arizona, the Flagship of the Eastern Pacific Fleet.

"Yup, I'm ready, Arizona." Alaska said, as she broke through a particularly large swell, applying a small amount of engine power to keep station.

"Good." The Flagship said. "I'm reading several large concentrations of energy signatures along the coast. The humans may try something to protect their craft. If they're sending something by orbital, it has to be important to them."

"Oh, by the way," Alaska said, sending her sensor data to the Flagship. "I getting some strange readings. It could be something moving supersonic, but the profile is all wrong, and I can't see anything."

Arizona paused for a moment as she reviewed the data Alaska had sent. "I'm sure it's nothing," she said "but if not, just kill it."

"Well, alright then." Alaska said. "I've got it."

Ars hugged the ground as he flew toward the coast, as so far as that was possible when moving at nearly three times the speed of sound.

Doing that in a conventional aircraft, of course, could have been something of a problem. One concern would have been maneuvering to stay within a safe distance of the ground without crashing into it, or popping up and ruining his concealment, which could cost him the element of surprise. Given that he still had the Cascades and Sierra Nevada Ranges between himself and the ocean, popping up probably wouldn't ruin the mission, but plowing into Mount St. Helens with the force of a cargo train at full speed probably would.

In any case, the flight to the coast had been programmed in advance, so until he approached the coast, there was very little for him to do. There were deviations from the terrain the program was based on, of course, but with his experience and the neural interface, correcting for those was child's play.

In addition, the sonic boom produced by a craft the size of Ragnarok moving at such a speed would be immense, sufficient to cause damage to even well-built structures. However, Ragnarok possessed a system unlike any possessed by every other aircraft on the planet.

The Maxwell-Tesseract Field.

The Maxwell-Tesseract Field was an electromagnetic field projected into the fourth dimension, then refracted back into the normal three in a form that could interact with real matter. Maybe. Truth be told, Ars didn't really understand much of it beyond that it involved electromagnetism and squared cubes. According to Raphael, the Phoenix Chief of Engineering and the man who had developed the system, no one, himself included, really understood it.

One thing that had been made clear, however, was that the Maxwell-Tesseract Field was _not_ a reskinned human Klein Field. The Klein Field operated on gravitic principals, while the Maxwell Field lay firmly in the realm of electromagnetism. Beyond that, however, there were critical operational differences.

The Klein Field operated by storing the energy of incoming attacks, then venting it slowly over time. While the theory stated that it was a simple matter to overload the field and hard crash the generators, then attack the hull of the ship directly while it attempted to vent the accumulated energy and reactivate the shield. In practice, however, things were almost universally more difficult. The massive capacity of the Klein Bottle the field used to store the energy, particularly on larger ships, made it practically impossible to deliver sufficient energy with the comparatively antiquated weapons humanity had at its disposal before the Fog vessel destroyed the opposing human forces.

On the other hand, the Tesseract Field operated more like projectable wall surrounding the craft. It helped reduce the damage from incoming attacks, but was much easier to penetrate than a Klein Field. The type of incoming attack mattered a lot more to a Maxwell Field; a Klein Field, which blocked everything with about the same efficiency. The Maxwell-Tesseract Field blocked attacks that relied on raw energy, such as the lasers that were the bane of modern aircraft, more effectively than it did kinetic weapons or explosions.

However, the Maxwell Field had other uses. Currently, he was projecting his Field around and ahead of his aircraft, creating a zone of normal pressure around it, somehow regulating the buildup of pressure and on the leading edge of the field. Raphael had likened the process to plasma supercavitation, but employing the Maxwell-Tesseract Field to form the bubble rather than an envelope of ionized gas.

All this had the net effect of greatly reducing the both the drag and the sonic boom produced by the Eladrin which, given its size and speed, would have been significant.

Ars began to angle south slightly as He reached the mountains. They passed him in a blur, miles vanishing behind him at an absurd pace. He was already out of secure transmission range of the Phoenix Base, but as he flew, he occasionally passed a laser transmitter. The unmanned transmitters were physically connected to a secure tactical network, allowing him to stay at least partially connected.

Ars watched as he approached the ridge line of the mountains. He would cross in ten seconds. Once he did, he would lose the cover and, more importantly, concealment the range currently granted him. He would become visible to every Fog radar array for more the two hundred miles.

He took a deep breath, then accelerated.

Ragnarok burst over the ridgeline like an avenging angel, the flare of superheated air from his plasma engine looking for all the world like a second sunrise behind him.

Alarms flashed across the displays surround the Mental Model of the Alaska. The simulacrum staggered as immense streams of data flowed into her from the Fog Joint Tactical Network.

"W-what... what is this?" She muttered, begin to process the information. She had just detected a massive airborne radar contact moving at incredible speed, a fairly small but intense heat source, and the n-waves of a supersonic object... all headed straight toward her.

"I... I'm a battleship of the Fog!" She said, voice shaking, trying to reassure herself. This new craft was impressive for a product of human engineering, but it was a human craft all the same. Its power curve was insane for something of its size, but still not nearly enough to saturate the Klein Bottle of a ship of her size.

She began to prepare herself for combat, and also to intercept the SSTO. There was a patrol boat in the path of the new human vehicle, and it would have to overcome that before it could even attempt to interfere with the interception mission.

Ars left the mountains, gaining altitude as he did so, and began to prepare himself for battle. A Fog patrol boat was stationed a few miles offshore; it would become his first target. The Eladrin had an impressive arsenal. As he approached, he readied his forward-facing weapons: three Hypervelocity Missile Launchers, or HVMs, and five 88mm aperture magnetic flux propulsion plasma weapon systems, or Starlight Rifles for short.

With a though and a flick of his finger, Ars brought the targeting sights for the HVM launchers onto the Fog boat. It lacked a Klein Field, and its armor was almost laughably thin. Ars pressed the firing stud.

A massive electrical charge was drawn into each of the HVM launchers. In a fraction of a second, the powerful railgun lining the missile tube launches the projectile forward, while simultaneously imparting the immense charge necessary to power its onboard engine.

The missiles lanced out of their launchers at more than twice the velocity of the Eladrin, lit off their onboard motors, and began to _accelerate_. Technically, they were guided weapons, but given their speed, meaningful course correction was functionally impossible.

That didn't matter. The weapons streaked down towards their target, exceeding ten times the speed of sound. In fact, the immense velocity of their passage was sufficient to literally ionize the air around them into plasma as they passed. Relatively cool plasma, as such things went, but still absurdly hot.

However, the designers of the weapon had expected this occurrence, and accounted for it in their final design. Still, they had not included any sort of design feature intended to discourage this effect. They had not, however, put considerable effort into _encouraging_ it.

Each HVM was equipped with a primitive Maxwell-Tesseract Field projector. It was nowhere near the complexity, power, or cost of those installed on the Eladrin, but, for the brief time before it burned out its motor and expended the energy endowed in it on launch, potent all the same. The projected field forced the plasma produced by the speed of the missile to flow around the body of the projectile, but not touch it. This created an effect on the weapon which, like a supercavitating torpedo, allowed the HVM to escape much of the drag it should have experienced, making the hypersonic weapon practical.

Atmospheric _plasma_ supercavitation.

The Hypervelocity missiles streaked toward the Fog patrol boat, instantly penetrating the point defense grid which, not even fully online, had next to no chance of stopping them.

One HVM struck the vessel in the superstructure, and the other two hit amidships, about halfway between the hull and the waterline. The energy of the collision liquidized everything on impact, but the iridium-osmium penetrator head of the HVM held together better than the nanomaterial armor of the Fog vessel. The jets of molten metal bored through the armor and feathered out into the compartments of the ship, burning and shredding everything in their path.

As Ars watched his missiles impact, an anti-air laser mounted on the Fog ship targeted Ragnarok and fired, sending a brief but incredibly powerful beam of coherent light with enough power to potentially melt a lesser aircraft slamming into the human fighter.

"Enemy laserfire detected." The Eladrin computer intoned. "Enemy laser impact. Field integrity unchanged."

"Commerce evasive maneuvers!" Ars commanded, bringing the Starlight rifles online. "Prioritize maintaining fields of fire."

As his aircraft began to jink erratically under computer control, Ars aimed his Starlight rifles. He drew a bead on the Fog ship and commanded his weapons to fire. The powerful magnetic fields in his plasma cannons rippled, sending the jet of ionized gas, far hotter than that which built up around a Hypervelocity Missile, shooting towards the maneuvering Fog patrol vessel.

The plasma shots crossed the space separating the combatants like a bolt of lightning. One of the shots went wide, striking the ocean and sending up a plume of steam, but the other four struck the fog ship, explosively melting and ablating material off the deck and hull where they struck.

A few seconds later, the Starlight Rifles fired again.

Just after he launched the second volley, dozens of threat indicators appeared on Ars' display. The enemy ship had finally gained a hard lock on him, and appeared to be firing everything it had. A swarm of small, swift interceptor missiles launched from several launchers on the deck of the Fog vessel, while a smaller number of larger, slower hybrid projectiles rose from Vertical Launch Cells on the deck of the ship.

Ars put his craft into a sharp right angle turn and activated his third main weapons system. The Eladrin was covered in dozens of small to medium rapid-firing railguns which provided it with close range fire power and formed the backbone of its point-defense system.

The missiles changed course to follow Ars and, as they closed, the railguns opened up. In a few frantic moments the hail of steel they threw destroyed most of the interceptor missiles. The larger missiles continued through the ruins of their destroyed brethren, all but three of them meeting the same fate.

A warning flashed across Ars' displays. Detonation Imminent.

As soon as Ars saw the message, the enemy missiles detonated. The Eladrin, and by extension, Ars, rocked violently as the shock waves struck the craft.

"Field integrity strong and recovering." The flight computer said. "Hull damage minimal. No loss of combat capabilities."

Ars brought the Eladrin back around and resumed his assault on the Fog patrol boat. Its movement had slowed somewhat, but the flight computer informed him that hadn't suffered significant loss of combat capability or hull integrity.

_Time to try something new_. Ars opened the targeting sight for his HVM launchers and aligned the crosshairs on the Fog ship. A laser slashed across his craft. His need for precision precluded significant evasive maneuvering, and, for the time being, his Tesseract Field was more than enough protection.

He lowered the crosshairs on the Fog torpedo boat to just above the waterline, squeezed off a shot, then rolled to the side to get clear of a larger laser turret currently rotating toward him. His maneuver worked; the computer registered a beam corona just under a hundred feet to his right.

The HVMs closed with the enemy ship, once again effortlessly penetrating its point defense. One of the missiles struck the hull of the ship just above the waterline, and another had been aimed too low and slammed into the ocean, ripping itself apart against the water before it could reach its target.

The third missile, however, entered the water at a shallow angle only a few feet short of the Fog ship. Its plasma shell vaporized the water just before it could touch it and, engine flaring, it struck the hull of the Fog vessel at full speed. It shredded the internal compartmentalization just as effectively as before, but this time a tide of seawater rushed in behind it

Ars gave no respite. Before he received damage assessments from the missile strikes, he brought his plasma guns to bear on the now-stricken ship and opened fire. Bolts of energy hotter than the surface of the sun hammered into the hull of the vessel, which was beginning to list. Ars went in for the kill.

He turned into a shallow dive toward the Fog vessel, reducing his speed. As he did so, the Maxwell-Tesseract Field surrounding his craft fluxed and reshaped, allowing a large turret assembly mounted on the belly of the Eladrin to rotate out of its minimum profile 'travel configuration'.

Ars grinned as the weapons on the turret, a heavy 120mm Starlight Cannon, with two side mounted 88mm plasma rifles, powered up. The smaller weapons fired first, their energy bolts struck point defense gun emplacements, empty, but bizarrely operational WWII quad-gun emplacements, and vaporized them. Instants later, the heavy plasma round struck. While its diameter wasn't that much larger than the smaller weapons, it used even hotter plasma than the smaller guns, and more of it was packed into the same amount of space. Combined with the surprisingly large volume increase over the smaller weapons, it was rated as nearly four times as powerful.

The 120mm plasma blast impacted one of the main turrets, ending its efforts to swat Ars from the sky.

As Ars leveled out only slightly higher than the tallest mast on the ship, he dropped to subsonic speed.

"Initiate railgun anti-surface fire." He commanded, focusing on controlling his approach, "Prioritize targeting thermal signatures and damage profiles consistent with plasma and HVM fire."

The railguns began to speak just after he did. Normally, they would have had next to no effect on an armored target, but the patrol boat had been severely damaged, and the selected targets already had their armor compromised.

Just as Ars finished his pass, secondary explosions began to wrack the enemy ship. He pulled up and accelerated as a congratulatory message flashed across his display, a small window next to it showing the floundering enemy vessel.

"...Wow." Melissa said, gesturing wildly at her station, "Look at Ars' neural activity readings! They're... how is he not dead?"

The readings were indeed impressive. Ars' neural activity was elevated far beyond his normal level, vastly exceeding the projections for neural activity during the admittedly demanding activity of Eladrin piloting.

"You have a point." Kalar muttered from the Surgeon station, "But even from the limited neural mapping I was able to do, Ars is an exceptional child. Combine that with the fact that we have next to no Eladrin interface data, and, until now, _absolutely_ no combat data, I think it's too soon to start calling anything an anomaly."

"Sir, the Eladrin pilot is moving to engage the next target," the telemetry tech shouted, "however, he's beyond the horizon of our tight beam laser communication arrays."

"Green light it." Commander Marcus said. "Use Morse Code pulses in the Over-the-Horizon Radar."

"On it." CAPCOM said.

Ars sighted the second Fog Patrol Vessel in his flight path. They were weak, as such things went, but many had been built as anti-aircraft platforms, a role which translated well to intercepting orbital vehicles.

He came in low, working to prevent the Fog craft from gaining a lock on him for as long as possible. As he detected the ship's fire control radar starting to lock on to him, he popped up and began to charge his HVM launchers.

"Laser buildup detected in target." The flight computer said.

Ars fired his HVMs. The hypersonic projectiles shot through the point defense zone of the enemy ship and impacted, gutting the vessel.

The Fog boat started glowing, twisting jags of light reaching out from the vessel as secondary explosions detonated across the surface. Ars' gravitational detectors screamed. An instant later, it exploded, the shockwave visible as it rushed across the water. Ars' eyes widened and he grabbed his controls as tightly as he could. Moments later, the Eladrin began to shake as the shock front reached it.

_That was odd_, Ars though, examining the data from the explosion, _I must have hit its main power facilities_.

Ars took a deep breath as he stabilized his flight path, then opened his threat map. According to his latest information, a destroyer, the former USS _Nicholas_, was the next largest threat to the SSTO launch.

_This one will have Wave Force Armor_ he thought, looking at the schematics of the ship, _but beyond that, it's just a bigger version of those other two_._ I think I can take it._

He banked, setting a straight course toward his chosen target. The destroyer he had set his sights on displaced nearly as much as the two ships he had destroyed before combined, with a thicker hull and a Klein Field to boot.

_A larger ship... if the reports are correct, it'll probably have better radar, and more missiles are a given._ He frowned. _Time to try something new_.

Ars pulled up, rapidly gaining height.

"Computer, optimize accelerometers and graviton traps for Klein Field saturation measurement and put it onscreen." Ars said, opening the ammo counts for his remaining weapons. The Starlight Rifles had practically limitless ammunition, and the supply of the metal slivers which fed the railguns was rarely a significant concern. He still had well over two dozen HVMs remaining, and he hadn't fired any of his conventional missiles.

He sat silently for a moment.

Several proximity alarms went off. The destroyer was entering combat range.

The 'mind' that controlled a Fog Fleet Destroyer was a simple thing. Maintain combat effectiveness, obey the Flagship, and destroy the enemy. Given its rather limited experience, _enemy _was synonymous with _human_. It understood, accepted and obeyed the order not to attack the humans until they attempted to break the blockade, but it could not comprehend the order. The logic had been explained several times, but it was entirely based around events in the 'future', things that would somehow occur in nonexistent processor cycles.

This grated on it. How could something exist without existing? However, that was no longer relevant now. The humans had come to the sea, in violation of the blockade. True, it had been rather difficult to decisively declare this craft to be human; it had demonstrated capabilities far beyond what the Flagship had told it to expect. However, it had come from the land and was not of the Fog, so it had to be human.

The Fog destroyer activated its fire control radars and locked them onto the enemy craft. It was maneuvering enough to make it difficult to target it with its lasers, but a missile attack wouldn't pose a problem.

It generated a firing solution and launched every missile it had at the maneuvering human aircraft. Conservation of ammunition required an understanding of the concept of a future, not one of its strong points.

Ars' eyes widened as he saw the incoming missile barrage. More than forty large missiles, and nearly twice as many smaller interceptors.

"Rail guns to Point Defense!" He shouted, keying commands to begin his own missile launch. He had known that this ship packed more missiles, but there was a difference between knowing that and seeing it projected around him. "Deploy decoys and commence evasive maneuvers."

Immediately, Ars made a sharp, turn, putting him perpendicular to the incoming missiles. Maneuvering jets across the surface of the Eladrin flared spinning the craft faster than any unprotected human could possibly survive.

He hated to be so repetitive in a combat situation, but it worked for the Horatii triplets, after all. In addition, the maneuver also allowed him to bring more of his point defense railguns to bear on the missiles as they approached.

The maneuver spread out the missiles by speed and acceleration as they approached and, by not flying directly into them, gave Ars' railguns more time to intercept them.

The small interceptor missiles, the first to reach him, began to explode as soon as they reached the edge of Ars' point defense sphere. The wave of missiles very nearly reached him, but the accuracy of his point defense guns increased as the sprint missiles closed, and successfully destroyed all of the incoming weapons before they could achieve the contact detonation they required.

The large hybrid missiles came in hot on the heels of their smaller brethren. They had had time to build up more momentum, and were much smarter, capable of performing limited evasive maneuvers. Around half of the swarm of forty was lured off course by one of his decoys, leaving more than enough to kill him.

Five of the missiles were destroyed as they enter his point defense sphere, torn to shreds by streams of high velocity precision engineered steel spikes the size of railroad nails. As the missiles were destroyed, his graviton traps screamed.

"Corrosive Warheads. Great," Ars muttered, looking at the warning. If one of those detonated in contact with the hull it... would be bad.

As his guns waxed three more missiles, Ars put his nose up and began to accelerate, launching another decoy along his previous path of flight. Four missiles bought it, remaining on course to follow the decoy. Eight left.

"Come on come come one," The missiles were change course to pursue him. Could they maneuver and accelerate hard enough to keep up with the-

"_Yes!_" The missiles overshot. Slightly, but enough. As they began to turn back toward him, Ars spun his craft along its vertical axis and brought its ventral railguns to bear. They opened fire.

_Allright, then_, Ars thought, as the last remaining missile disintegrated. _I think it's my turn_. He activated his missile systems. Four rotary launchers, two on each flank of the Eladrin, began to spin, and each one began firing AGM-185 Air-to-ship missiles at a rate of just under one per second. The missiles locked onto the gravity signature of the Fog ship, lit their engines, and rocketed towards it.

Naturally, they moved much slower than the Hypervelocity Missiles, but there were a lot more of them. The point defense grid of the Fog ship swatted many of them, but more got through, detonating against its Klein Field.

The AGM-185 missiles had been developed as a complement to the Eladrin project. It carried much less rocket fuel than a weapon of a similar size, but it used a propellant which possessed a somewhat higher energy density that was commonly available. Given that it designed to be fired _down_ from a craft that moved faster than most missiles, the designers had decided that this was an acceptable trade-off.

In exchange, they had packed the thing with explosives. Against even a destroyer's Klein field, the blast was insignificant, but when dozens of then detonated nearly simultaneously, they added up.

Ars watched as the calculated Klein Bottle saturation rose. _Twelve... fifteen percent_. _That'll have to work._ He activated his Starlight Rifles and opened fire.

The bolts of ionized gas struck the Klein Field of the ship, causing a rather unimpressive degree of saturation. That, however, wasn't the point. The Starlight Rifle was among the first weapons developed by humanity for the sole purpose of fighting the Fleet of Fog.

As each bolt struck, it began to be neutralized by the field layered over the ship. However, the immense energy of the blast was not to be deterred so easily. A small portion of the most energetic plasma, as the blast was neutralized, emerged from the center of the bolt as the outer layers were stripped away and continued through the barrier, superheating the air around it and, as it approached, the Wave Force Armor of the Hull. This ablated a thin layer of the armor producing an explosive force which, combined with the heat, damaged the Armor at the point struck beyond functionality.

Ars watched with satisfaction as the saturation percentage of the enemy's Klein Bottle rose to twenty-two percent. Better yet, several bright red spots were appearing on a holographic projection of the enemy ship under the saturation readout, displaying irregularities in the Klein Field caused by the Starlight Rifle impacts. His lips split into a vicious, predatory grin as he fired a second volley of plasma shots, then a third.

The Fog destroyer retaliated, saturating the sky around Ragnarok with energy beams, most of it wasted. The few that did connect were glancing hits, merely sweeping across the Eladrin rather than lingering long enough to cause meaningful harm. Ars haloed the three largest weak points in the Klein Field and fired his HVMs.

One missile was off target slightly and struck the Klein Field slightly outside the target area, saturating the bottle slightly but having no major effect. Another struck on target. It was deflected, but Ars noted a significantly larger increase in saturation.

The third missile, however, struck the weaken area of the shield, slowed slightly, and kept going. The missile struck the hull forward of the superstructure and penetrated, shredding itself as it cut into the interior spaces of the ship.

Ars watched as a plume of smoke rose from the site of the impact. The smoke was blown back over the superstructure of the vessel by the ship's formidable speed which, Ars noted with some satisfaction, had dropped below a hundred knots. He did nothing for a moment and simply few a straight course, exempting computer-controlled evasion maneuvers, while allowing the computer to analyze the Fog ship's loss of point defense and anti-air capabilities. Once this task was complete, he steered his craft into a wide, banking turn to continue his attack.

Raphael, along with the rest of the Phoenix engineering staff, watched the ongoing battle with baited breath. Their eyes were glued to massive screen that covered most of one wall of the massive central cavern of the engineering department, a space generally used as a hanger and, at present, a makeshift theater.

The Eladrin closed with the enemy ship, making extensive use of the hole in its point defense and hammering it with plasma fire. Raphael's fingers dug into his palms as the saturation of the enemy's Klein Bottle climbed under the hail of fire. _Eighty... eighty-eight... ninety-five... come on come on come on_.

Another volley of HVMs streaked toward the enemy ship. One was blocked by the Klein field, but the next two impacted unopposed. Then-

"WE HAVE BARRIER COLLAPSE!" Someone shouted.

"YES! TAKE THAT! MELTA SPAM ALL THE WAY!" The chief engineer shouted, jumping pointing at the massive screen.

"WOO HOO."

The general freak-out currently occurring in the Engineering Department was, from a rational point of view, completely reasonable. The men and women there were witnessing the culmination of, in many cases, over a decade of labor. More importantly, they were finally starting to see it pay off. As the staff watched the Eladrin pump plasma fire and HVMs into the stricken enemy of humanity, they became ecstatic.

Slowly, as the outcome became clear, the engineering staff began to calm down.

"Okay, people," Raphael said, clapping his hands together, "We did a great job on the Eladrin, but we are _professionals_, and we have important things to do." He gave the room a moment to quiet down. "Now, the betting pool is open! Sextuple or nothing on your victory bets, the new line on tonnage sunk is fifty-five hundred..."

The AI controlling the _Nicholas _was beginning to become concerned. Its Klein Field had been overloaded and collapsed, and it had sustained severe hull damage, including several breaches and, more concerningly, the destruction of large areas of its Wave Force Armor. Until the damage was repaired, a process which could take days, raising a new barrier would be extremely difficult and result in a Field a fraction of its normal strength.

After several seconds of calculations, the AI reached a decision. It had to retreat. It began to come around, just as the enemy aircraft turned for another attack run. Moments later, it detected weapons separation. It quickly registered incoming fire from the enemy's hypersonic weapons. That wasn't a significant concern; it could easily-

One of the missiles struck a severely damaged patch of armor on the stern of the ship, penetrated, and eviscerated the starboard gravity engine. Not only did this cause the obvious loss of propulsion power, but the resulting secondary explosion tore a large hole in the hull around the engine housing and, much more importantly, compromised the containment on one of the ship's main Thanatonium power modules.

As feedback from the destroyed module and engine began to wrack the rest of the power plant, the rest of the modules began to destabilize. An automatic response system kicked in and ejected the nineteen remaining modules from the ship. This disconnected them from the power grid and stabilized them, but came with the notable disadvantage of ejecting the modules.

Water began to pour into the ship, which now lacked even the power to use its pump systems to slow its sinking. As the prow of the ship began to rise out of the water, something that could be called a thought flashed through the Union Core of the ship. Especially given its origins, it was deep and profound, a brilliant commentary on the nature of everything. Translated to something an organic intelligence could understand, this proto-though went something like this.

_Well, shit_.

"YES!" Ars shouted, watching the kill confirmation from the Fog destroyer appear. "WHO'S NEXT?"

Ars figured he had enough ammunition remaining to continue the engagement. He opened his map of the battlespace to look for another target. What Ars did next would, viewed in coldly reasonable hindsight, could not be considered the pinnacle of tactical genius. In fact, an excellent argument could be made that it was close to the exact opposite. However, Ars was drunk on victory, and in the heights of his first real combat adrenaline rush.

The battlecruiser _Alaska_ had engaged the SSTO with its lasers at extreme range, so far to no avail. As made a slight adjustment and set a heading directly toward the Capital Ship.

_So, this isn't just some drone, it's one of the bastards responsible for the state of this world. This ship could be one of the ones that was at Second Midway_, Ars though, looking over the statistics of the targeted ship. _This ship could have been one of the ones that killed my father_.

The plasma engine of the Eladrin flared to its maximum safe level, responding to the desire of its pilot. Ars leaned forward in his seat against the acceleration, teeth bared and eyes fixed on the icon representing the _Alaska_.

"What the hell is that idiot doing?" Melissa shouted, practically jumping out of her seat in the CIC and turning towards the commander, jabbing a finger at her screen. "He's attacking a Battlecruiser! Does he even have the authority to do that?"

"Ars' orders were to engage the Fleet of Fog and interfere with their attempts to intercept the SSTO." The commander said, "Besides, Ars is currently outside the range of our ground based communications gear. We can't contact him." Marcus shrugged, "Under these circumstance, he has free rein to determine how best to carry out his orders. As it happens, I agree with his interpretation. I suppose we could recall him, but we'd have to sacrifice a satellite to do so, and we both know how hard those are to replace."

"But... how can you be so nonchalant about it? Do you really think Ars has a chance of winning, or even surviving? Losing the Eladrin would be much worse than losing a satellite."

"Winning? No, the Eladrin lacks the firepower necessary to take down a Fog Capital Ship." The corners of his lips twitched upwards. "For now, anyway. Survival, however, is a completely different matter. Assuming he doesn't attack recklessly, I would say that he as an excellent chance of occupying this battlecruiser's full attention for the duration of the intercept window. "

"I... but... fine." Melissa slid back down into her seat.

"As it happens, I agree." Kalar said. The Medical Officer was lying back in his chair at the Surgeon's station, which he had _somehow_ gotten to recline, with his feet up on his desk. As absurd as it seemed, without a direct, live data feed on the pilot's vitals, there was little the Flight Surgeon could do other than watch the battle and send the ground crew the occasional message about what ailments the pilot might land with. "That brat lost me a lot of money, but I don't think any of us expected him to perform this well. From what I've seen, though, I don't have any reason to doubt him.

Alaska frowned as her latest volley of lasers failed to contact the human orbital craft. She still had plenty of time to intercept the vehicle, but this particular SSTO was proving much harder to intercept than most other similar spacecraft.

At that moment, a message indicating the destruction of the _Nicholas_ appeared on her display. Moments later, her long range radar array informed her of large airborne contact approaching her at insane speed. Almost immediately, her IFF informed her that this target was the hostile that had sunk the _Nicholas_, along with two patrol boats.

Alaska raised a hand and, with a gesture like brushing frost off a window, opened a farseeing.

A disk about four feet in diameter outlined in light appeared next to, showing the approaching aircraft with incredible detail. It was a sleek thing; its basic shape looked something like a winged spearhead. On closer inspection, however, there were some rather odd details. The craft had more protuberances than most other human aircraft she had seen, including several that looked like folded up appendages. It lacked a visible canopy, but was an order of magnitude larger than any of the human drones she had seen. The skin of the craft was jet black, but it was marbled by geometric patterns of deep blue lines which seemed to glow slightly.

In any case, Alaska could hardly afford having it interfere with her efforts to intercept the SSTO; she had to destroy it. She raised her hand, and nearly a hundred missile hatches along the eight hundred foot length of the ship opened. She waved it forward and the missiles launched, sending a swarm of death toward the distant aircraft.

Ars watched the wave of missiles approaching the Eladrin. They were still miles away, but closing at an insane pace.

"Computer, bring the Starlight Rifles to maximum rate of fire, minimum energy output and bolt coherency to maintain lethality on target at range. Commence fire at maximum engagement range."

As Ars began targeting the missiles he switched to manual control, allowing the computer the focus its full resources on the task of generating the requested firing solutions. The _Alaska_ had opened fire on him with its lasers, but they were poorly targeted and severely underpowered, much of their energy and focus having been lost traveling through dozens of miles of atmosphere to reach him.

Still, however, there were a disturbingly large number of them and, according to the reading Ars was getting off the beam coronas, had much more energy behind them than those from the destroyer.

When the missiles closed to within ten miles of the Eladrin, two things happened. First, the Fog Battlecruiser ceased its laserfire. Given the relative positions of the combatants, continuing would have required it to shoot through its own missile formation and risk destroying them.

Second, the plasma guns on the Eladrin opened fire on the incoming missiles. The first few shots were practically useless, but as the range dropped, the accuracy increased dramatically, and the Starlight guns destroyed five of the missiles before they came within five miles.

The missiles continued to close. As watched as the Starlight Rifles obliterated another ten missiles, keeping an eye on their heat levels, which were hovering on the edge of 'safe' for combat operations. He switched his point defense to his railguns.

Power was redirected. As the railguns began to fire, it became clear they'd be overwhelmed. At that moment, Ars had one of the best terrible ideas of his life. He redlined his plasma drive, sending Ragnarok rocketing into the center of the oncoming missile formation.

He had just enough time start recovering from the sudden acceleration when the first missile detonated. He rocked in his seat as, one after another, the missiles detonated around the Eladrin, the blast waves and clouds of shrapnel sapping the integrity of its Maxwell-Tesseract Field.

As it happened, the tactic was not quite as stupid as it first appeared. The missiles were moving extremely quickly, which greatly limited their maneuverability. Therefore, only the missiles near the center of the formation were able to maneuver close enough to cause meaningful damage.

_I may actually live through this_, Ars though. His Maxwell Field readings seemed to support this, until the first corrosive warhead detonated. The black sphere of destruction began to expand. The moment it touched the hull of his aircraft, he was done. The Eladrin lacked the mass and volume to survive such an attack, and even a glancing hit could destroy the aerodynamics of the craft and send him to his death.

The orb of the Corrosive detonation expanded toward his craft. The bizarre gravatic rift grew until it came within about a foot of the skin of the Eladrin, where it stopped. Alarms blared inside the cockpit as an impression of the Eladrin was cut into detonation.

Then the Corrosive distortion flashed, emitting a shower of exotic radiation which momentarily blinded Ars' sensors, and vanished.

Ars surveyed his displays as they came back online, mildly shocked that he wasn't dead. Somehow, his Maxwell-Tesseract Field had stopped the Corrosive attack, but at a cost; everywhere the enemy gravity weapon had touched, the Tesseract Field had been frayed to almost nothing.

The Mental Model of the _Alaska_ was concerned. Not only had this strange human vehicle destroyed three Fog escort vessels, it had survived contact with a Corrosive weapon. That should have been impossible. It possessed no Wave Force Armor, she was certain of that. Even if it had, nothing of that size could project a Klein Bottle powerful enough to absorb a Corrosive Warhead.

As she began charging her secondary and tertiary photon cannons to resume firing on the enemy aircraft, she detected weapon separation. Three small projectiles, moving twice as fast as the incoming enemy and _accelerating_.

She jump, letting out a small _eep_. Frantically, she commanded every charged tertiary gun with a line of sight to open fire on the projectiles. The secondary guns joined in a second later, filling the air with burning streams of light.

The fan of fire emanating from the eight hundred foot ship widened as the missiles closed. Moments before impact, a beam from a secondary turret sliced through one of the projectiles, ripping it to pieces. The Two surviving missiles impacted a moment later, vaporizing as they struck the Klein Field layered over the ship.

Alaska flinched at the impacts. They had caused only a fraction of a percentage of field saturation, but it was a _big_ fraction, far more than any two human weapons of that size had any business causing.

She began to give the command to resume fire, but before she could complete it, the target did something. Suddenly, there were five identical contacts on her scopes, moving in a complex formation, weaving inside each other's course like a swarm of deranged insects.

They drew together for a moment, then three more missiles shot out of the cluster toward her. _Decoys!_ She realized, _but how do I find the real one...?_ She considered for a moment, then reactivated her farseeing.

The effigy began frantically searching the sky, waving her hand that anchored the farseeing around as she tried to align it with the human aircraft.

Ars fired his maneuvering thrusters, things truly out of place on an atmospheric craft, pushing Ragnarok several yards downward just as an enemy laser split the air he had just occupied.

He smiled as the beam cut out, rolling his Eladrin to the side to avoid another pair of incoming beams. His plan was working perfectly. The Fog ship had completely ceased attacking the SSTO. Further, the decoy drones also seemed to be completely successful, drawing away significant portions of the laser fire directed at him.

A beam punched through the weakened section of his defensive field, vaporizing a small channel into his armor before he ducked out of its path. He launched another volley of HVMs, and the incoming defensive fire slacked as the enemy attempted to intercept the missiles.

Ars cut in toward the Battlecruiser, closing to within the range of his Starlight Rifles. He sighted them on the ship and fired. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to drawn his drones alongside him before firing.

All of the plasma bolts struck their designated targets. This time, however, against the Klein Field of a full Capital Ship, they failed to burn through the field nearly as well as they had against the destroyer.

The Fog vessel responded, finally emptying boxes of interceptor missiles at him. He called his decoys in close, ordering the drones to form a shield between him and the ship as his own point defense weapons began firing.

The sprint missiles lived up to their name, closing insanely quickly. Ars lost two of his drones the second the swarm hit, including the one he had stationed over the breach in his Field.

A missile darted in, jinked down towards the breach, and detonated.

_Hull integrity intact_. Ars spun his craft, exposing its undamaged underside to the onslaught. His maneuver caused a slight lapse in his point defense, allowing several of the missiles to close.

The missiles shot in, bracket the Eladrin, and exploded. As the detonations rocked his craft and obliterated his remaining drones, Ars found himself laughing. _This_ was it. _This_ was what he had been born for.

The barrage of missiles died off, leaving the Eladrin intact. Ars rolled back to level and resumed firing, orbiting the enemy craft as he did so.

Afterwards, he couldn't really have said how long he had continued his attack. The Fog ship fired more interceptor missiles at him, but it fired each box as he moved into its firing arc, not saving them for another barrage like the first and, for the most part, his evasive maneuvering kept him ahead of the Fog lasers. He occasionally spun the Eladrin to line up a shot with his HVM launchers but, for the most part, settled for distracting the ship.

Eventually, the SSTO crossed through the intercept window, dropping below the western horizon. A message indicating this appeared on the display inside the cockpit of the Eladrin.

Ars broke off of his current half-finished orbit of the battlecruiser and made for home.

Commander Marcus, Melissa, and Kalar, three of the most influential personalities in the Phoenix organization, waited on the platform overlooking the Hanger Ars had been instructed to land in.

"I" Melissa shook her head, "I can't believe that just happened."

"This really is one for the history books." Kalar agreed.

"We've been working towards this for years." The commander said, not taking his eyes off the timer mounted on the far wall indicating the returning Eladrin's ETA. His voice lowered. "I just hope no one thinks this is even close to over, or that any more of our battles will be this easy."

The sound of machinery filled the chamber as the elevator to the surface began to descend. The chamber exploded into motion as the various ground crew teams scrambled to ensure they were ready for the arrival of the war machine.

The sound of the elevator drew closer. Abruptly, a massive platform dropped from the ceiling. A slight breeze followed it into the chamber and washed across those assembled.

Then the Eladrin came into sight, crouched atop the platform on its bizarre leg-things. Its black skin was covered in scorch marks, and several large chunks appeared to have been burned or cut out of its armor.

The three officers hurried, nearly at a run, down from the platform, onto and across the hangar floor. It was incredibly busy, but the mere presence of the commander seemed to split the crowd without any discernible action.

Raphael, the Engineering chief, was overseeing operations around the landed Eladrin. He turned to face the group as they approached. Behind him, a group of ground crewmen were wrangling what appeared to be fire hoses, using them to spray down the Eladrin.

"Commander," He said, nodding to Marcus. "We were spraying the bird down with an anti-rad agent. Standard procedure for anything exposed to a corrosive warhead."

It took only a few minutes to finish decontaminating Ragnarok. As the crewmen manning the houses stood down, a massive crane shaped like a flat, inverted 'u' moved into position, straddling the Eladrin. Raphael entered several commands into a control panel on one leg of the crane. As he did so, a robotic arm descended from the center of the crane's crossbar, bringing something that looked vaguely like an unholy hybrid of a buzzsaw, a can opener, and a bar code reader to bear on the cockpit hatch.

Raphael entered several more commands, and the machine descended into position over cockpit hatch on the Eladrin and went to work. It quickly cut through the spot welds that had formed on the outer armored hatch. The machine withdrew, and the pilot's seat began to rise out of the craft.

Melissa rushed forward, grabbing onto a ladder hanging down from a gantry being lowered into position next to the cockpit. She reached the top as it settled into position, moments before the pilot seat cleared the craft.

The neural interface needles retracted from the pilot, and Ars slumped to the side. Melissa caught him before he fell out of his seat.

"How'd I do?" Ars muttered, then passed out.

"So, he'll live?"

"Yea, he's fine." Kalar said. "Neural link overload. As inexperienced as he is, there really isn't any way to avoid it."

Commander Marcus nodded. "Excellent. I wish I could stay to monitor his recovery, but," he sighed, "I have to go."

Kalar raised an eyebrow. "Where?"

"St. Louis." He said closing his eyes and tilting his head back. "Politics."

Commander Marcus stepped up to the podium. A human sinking a Fog warship was a major occurrence, and the destruction of three, including one with a Klein Field, _without using thermonuclear weapons_, in fifteen minutes was nothing short of incredible.

President Constantine had called a joint session of Congress to review the events. The assembly moved with uncharacteristic speed, and both houses had assembled within hours. While there was far more to be done at Phoenix HQ than he was comfortable leaving, but he had to move quickly to gain the maximum benefit from the recent victory.

The Legislators were arrayed before him in a massive half-circle. The New Congress Chamber was laid out much like the old one in Washington, albeit on a much larger scale to accommodate a workstation for each of the six hundred and twenty five House Representatives and one hundred and forty-four Senators.

"Ladies and gentlemen of Congress. Today, my organization has won an unprecedented victory over the Fleet of Fog. The weapon we used to accomplish this victory has, by necessity, been kept classified until very recently."

He made a sign to one of his aides, instructing him to send the data file on the Eladrin to the assembled Congressmen. He gave them a minute to read through it, listening to the low murmur that echoed through the massive chamber.

"We refer to this weapons platform as the Eladrin." Marcus continued. "It is fundamentally different from every other combat aircraft on Earth. It employs advanced weapons Phoenix has developed, granting them a combat platform with the survivability needed to use them effectively. Save perhaps the I-401, Eladrin Sigma 12 is the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of humanity." Marcus paused for a moment, took a breath, and continued.

"We have four additional Eladrin units currently mothballed in various stages of the manufacturing process, with optimal pilots already selected, and if we had the funding, could have them combat ready in a matter of weeks. The estimated average cost for full activation would be just under five billion."

"Five billion for another four of these things," a representative mused, "Sounds like a pretty good bargain to-"

"The estimated figure was a unit cost, not a total, sir." Marcus corrected.

"Why do we need to spend anything on this project?" One of the Massachusetts Senators asked, not looking up from her desk."

"It could be because we're at war." Marcus said, "And the Eladrin project is the only thing that has been empirically proven to offer a substantial chance of victory."

"What do you mean, we're at war?" The Senator demanded, "The Fog haven't taken any hostile actions against us for more than a decade. You want us to go looking-"

Marcus raised an eyebrow. "Not at war? No hostile actions? I think _murdering seventy five million Americans_ would be more than enough _Casus Belli_ to ignore a little seventeen year... lull. I propose that Phoenix is granted the needed funding to bring the remaining Eladrin units to full active status, and that its ongoing budget is, at minimum, doubled."

"Why," another representative demanded, standing up, "are you using children as pilots?"

"It is a mechanical necessity of the control system." Marcus responded, the practiced line rolling off his tongue. "At present, the interface system we use cannot effectively interface with the nervous system of an adult. The specifics are both extremely complex and highly classified, but in essence, a normal human lacks certain synapses needed for interface, and an adult is incapable of developing them."

He coughed, then continued. "Also, out pilots are in their mid-teens, on the edge of childhood. Indeed, for most of human history, they would be considered full legal adults. Furthermore, our selection system endeavored to find pilot candidates with the mental and emotional stability needed to tolerate the demands we must place on them." _And I certainly hope they were successful_.

"Commander, I have a question," David Baker, one of the Texas Senators said. He was an influential man, and a grizzled veteran of both the East Asian War and several of the major Middle East campaigns. "How effective would you consider this Eladrin system to be against modern combat aircraft?"

"Think of what an F-32 Hyperion could do to World War II prop-driven fighters." Marcus said. "It would be like that."

"And you want to put that level of killing power in the hands of children?"

"And you want to gamble everything on Japan's Vibration Torpedo?"

Senator Baker clasped his hands and looked down for a moment. "You have my vote."

"Thank you, sir." Marcus said. That was one vote, but he still had a long way to go. "Now, any further questions?"

As he spoke, the display tastefully concealed in the podium which indicated which Representatives wished to speak lit up like a crème brûlée. _This_ he thought, keeping his face neutral, _is going to be a long day_.

"So," Alexander said, stirring a stick of Caffeine powder into his cocoa, "How do you think it went?"

"Given that you watched the whole thing," Marcus replied, scooping a generous portion of ice chunks into his cup, "I would imagine that know exactly how it went."

"I know what happened but, given that you never tell anyone _anything_, I don't know if you accomplished anything." Alexander took a sip of his coca and leaned back in his seat, then continued, "You were aiming to channel money somewhere else, and your rather impressive appeal to funding was in fact a miserable failure."

"Well, I got most of what I wanted." Marcus said, "Which was the money, mostly. I also was aiming for some more operational privileges, but that was a secondary objective at most. I don't suppose you could give me nuclear release permission, could you?"

"You're not _that_ good a friend, Marcus," the President muttered.

Marcus shrugged. "Worth a try. On the topic of nukes, how are your war preparations going?"

"As well as could be expected, given the... scale."

"Now what could such a mysterious comment _possibly_ mean?"

"Because you've been any different over the past decade."

"Heh. Fair point, I suppose." Marcus chuckled for a moment, then his face straightened abruptly and raised his glass. "Too absent companions."

"And future victories."


	3. Chapter 3

**Oregon Coast**

As the sun dipped below the Pacific Ocean, the shore guns along the Oregon, Washington, and southern British Columbian coast opened fire on the Fog Fleet still stationed some distance offshore. Even considering the range, just a couple dozen miles, the accuracy of the guns was terrible. Only around one round in ten detonated harmlessly against the foe's Klein Fields.

Further from the shore, a short-lived wave of light swept across the countryside as hundreds of BGM-225 Cavalier anti-ship missiles launched from a variety of platforms lit off their boosters and rocketed toward their distant targets.

As the missiles entered their terminal boost phase, in a hardened silo just south of the little town of Depoe Bay, the submersible _USS Merrimack_ dropped into the water. She was a small ship, just over two hundred feet in length.

She employed a magnetohydrodynamic or 'caterpillar' drive which, after nearly a hundred years of development and a few pieces of Phoenix-developed tech, was finally a practical, if slow, method of silent underwater travel. Her carbon-fiber hull was layered with anti-sonar active tiles, rounding out her stealth abilities.

The _Merrimack_ began to advance down the short, cleverly concealed tunnel leading to the ocean as the missile barrage impacted the Fog ships. She reached the end of the tunnel and slipped out into open water, becoming all but invisible.

In the command chair of the _Merrimack_, Captain John Gallagher watched the displays in the 'CIC' of his ship and went over his mission.

The ongoing artillery assault on the Fog was going terribly. Which was the idea. Many of the shells contained cluster warheads. Each of the small bombs was set to detonate on a different random timer. Combined with the acoustic jamming gear loaded into a few of the shells and the massive detonations from the conventional shells, sonar was worse than useless.

Of course, the _Merrimack_ was designed to operate in just such conditions. Using pre-placed transponders and special optical gear for guidance, it silently glided toward its target.

"All right, gentlemen," Gallagher said, addressing the twenty-eight man crew of his ship, all of whom were located inside in the command cradle in the center of the ship. "We have three potential targets for our salvage operation. Given the conditions and relative locations of the wrecks, the target we have selected to loot is Serra Three, the former USS _Nicholas_. I'm sure I don't need to say this, but stay on edge. This is a very dangerous operation, and nothing quite like it has ever been attempted."

(X)

**Concept Comm System VR Space**

"So, Alaska," Flagship Arizona of the Fog East Pacific Fleet prompted, "Please explain your failure to me."

The two Mental Models, whose vessels were currently miles apart, were sitting in a Virtual Reality space projected by Alaska, a circular stone platform on the side of a misty, snow covered alpine slope. There was a small table at the center of the patio, where the two appeared from a distance to be relaxing.

"I'm sorry, flagship," Alaska pled, looking miserably down at her empty teacup. "I messed up-"

"You messed up?" Arizona challenged, raising an eyebrow. The Flagship's Mental Model was a woman in her early twenties, with long, dark red hair, harsh features, and dark eyes. She routinely wore full plate armor, parading around in it like it was a sweatsuit. "That seems like a grave understatement."

"Really?" Alaska turned her head upward to meet her flagship's face.

"Yes," Arizona said, "I'd say you utterly, completely, and miserably failed. Saying you messed up implies a certain degree of mediocrity in the failure, which was clearly absent in your case. Your data suggests that you caused damage to the enemy craft before you permitted it to escape. Was it meaningful?"

"N... no." Alaska admitted.

"Hummm." the crimson-haired battleship's representation licked her lips like a wolf circling for the kill. "What leads you to that conclusion?"

"The enemy craft continued operating at full efficiency, indicating that all systems damaged were secondary, or backed up by secondaries with equal effectiveness." The smaller battlecruiser explained, hanging her head such that her long, jade hair draped over her shoulders partially obscuring her face. "I can only conclude the damage done can most likely be easily repaired."

Arizona laughed, a smile breaking through to her face as she bounced in her seat and slapped the table. Alaska jumped in her seat, started at the sudden action. "I had forgotten." the battleship chortled, still chuckling. "You are pretty smart. I was just going to say the damage was insignificant because the enemy made it back to base. In any case, that makes it kind of funny you fell for an obvious ploy like going for the fighter instead of focusing on the SSTO."

"I'm sorry F...Flagship," Alaska said, whimpering. "I just..."

Abruptly, Arizona's demeanor returned normal, as if the conversation had never happened. "In any case, I was able to spin my report to Yamato, so no one's getting any actual consequences." She sighed before continuing. "Also, Saratoga and her..." she paused for a moment, tapping a finger against her head, "_Singulare_, I think she said, a heavy cruiser called Seydlitz, are being transferred in. There's always drama during transitions, and I have to go deal with it. You may go."

(X)

**North-East Pacific**

The _Merrimack_ went into action almost before it reached its objective. As it coasted to a stop, dozens of robotic arms extended from ports on the side of the submarine and reached out towards the wrecked Fog destroyer.

They went to work with a variety of implements, scanning the hull and deck before extending cutting implements, coaxing apart the mostly dead nanomaterials to reveal the priceless components within.

The vast majority of a Fog ship was made out of more or less raw nanomaterials. However, many of the components that had more specialized roles were made of more permanent materials. In particular, nanomaterials couldn't handle the energy load of power systems, meaning they had to be made out of priceless, permanent, necessary components.

As the robotic appendages detected these gems, they switched to manipulator tools which carefully collected the components and transferred them to secondary arms, which carried them to ports into the submarine's hull. Other arms wielded strange devices that were essentially a combination pump, sieve, and sluice box, implements to filter active, 'live' nanomaterials from those that had been destroyed by the Eladrin's attack, or 'died' after the Union Core of the destroyer lost control of them.

Gallagher looked over the readouts of the ongoing salvage operation. They were finding good stuff so far, in about the same proportions as the Second Midway salvage haul. Unfortunately, that meant no Thanatonium. The enemy torpedo, power plants, and anything else containing traces of the exotic material self-destructed on the sinking of the ship, meaning that Phoenix scientist had only been able to infer its properties.

However, it looked like-

"My God." Captain Gallagher whispered, "Could that be..." He snapped his head up. "Helm, move us two hundred feet, bearing," he consulted the display, "One hundred twelve degrees. Salvage teams; be on the lookout for Fog reactor modules."

The _Merrimack_ shifted position and began the first harvest of Thanatonium in human history. They collected nineteen power modules in all, each several feet in diameter and nearly twice as tall as a man.

Amidst the suppressed excitement, no one took any particular note when an absent-minded junior salvage tech directed the arm under her control to pick up a small flattened metal sphere about the size of an open hand, boldly emblazoned with the symbol of the Fleet of Fog.

(X)

**Appalachian Mountains, Virginia**

Eric Glenn rode in the first car, facing backwards. He was almost fresh out of Armor School where they had put him on the train out of Fort Benning.

He sighed. Honestly, he wasn't entirely sure why he had agreed to 'volunteer' for Armor School. The United States covered nearly all of North America, and was the only real military power on the continent, and tanks weren't really any good against the Fog.

The train plunged into a tunnel. Eric stiffened as the outside light was cut off as, then relaxed as tunnel lights began flickering past him.

The train felt like it was moving downward, slowing into a gentle curve. The other people in the car began whispering to one another. Eric frowned. Apparently, none of the others had expected this either.

The train continued into the darkness for several minutes, braking as it descended. Eric felt the train level out onto a straight course and begin braking harder.

The moment the train ground to a halt, doors opened at either end of the compartment. Eric stood up, collecting the suitcase that contained his current meager belongings, as well as a backpack containing other assorted odds and ends. He never had gotten out of the habit of carrying one.

Eric walked to the end of the car, down a short flight of steps, and off the train. He was one of the first off, and it only took a few minutes for the car to empty. A man in dress uniform bearing the insignia of captain stood in front of the assembling troops.

The floor was bare concrete, and the wall appeared to be steel-reinforced stone. The first thing Eric noticed was the heat, dry but constant, like standing in front of an oven. If he strained his ears, he could hear the sound of heavy machinery in the distance, though he had no idea what it could be for.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," the man said, as the last stragglers exited the train," I am Captain Hoffman, and I have the privilege of welcoming you to Forge One. As there is presently no Forge Two or Three, we just call it The Forge. Now," he said, turning around, "if you'll follow me."

Hoffman led the group, which probably numbered somewhere over a hundred, down a long passageway, continuing to talk as he did so.

"As you can probably guess, we try to keep this facility as secret as we can. In essence, the purpose of this facility is to maintain the ability of the Unites States military to wage war, even in the case of a major Fog bombardment."

He said nothing for a second. "Also, this is where we work on some... special projects. Ones we want to keep out of the sight of the Fog, and therefore the public." Hoffman stopped in front of a large door. Eric guessed it was about fifty feet tall, and at least as wide. Engraved in large, bold print across it were the words SUPERHEAVY BAY ONE.

Hoffman walked over to a button mounted on the wall next to the door and pressed it. A klaxon sounded, and the door slowly slid open, retracting into the wall. Captain Hoffman bowed and waved the group forward.

The door led to a balcony overlooking a massive cavern. Eric looked down.

Sitting on the floor of the cavern was what looked like a tank, but far, _far_ larger. It was roughly square shaped, with steeply sloped sides. The gun was casement mounted, but judging by the position, it appeared the whole upper portion of the vehicle rotated like some sort of massive turret. Just judging by the scale, Eric knew the main gun had to be _massive_, but it was somewhat overshadowed by the absurd size of the vehicle.

The edges of the massive turret bristled with something which, straining his eyes, Eric could make out to be smaller guns, probably for point defense. There were five smaller turrets, mounted on the corners and center of the flat top of the turret. Eric realized with a start that, given the scale, they had to be about the size of the turrets of the tanks he had trained on.

"This," Hoffman said, gesturing, "is the Heavy Ordnance Ranged Utility System. HORUS for short. After the Fog appeared, it was clear that our weapons weren't even remotely powerful enough, and we didn't know whether any of Phoenix's projects would pay off. This was the result of the Army's efforts." He paused, surveying the various shocked expressions of the soldiers.

"In short, they went fancy. We went _big_."

"Any questions?"

(X)

**Phoenix Infirmity**

Ars awoke slowly. He looked around, confused for a moment, and then realized that he must be in the Phoenix infirmary. The Eladrin had been pretty beaten up when he had flown it into the hanger, and he supposed he must have put a lot of strain on himself with the neural interface system.

He took a deep breath, then stack a few pillows and propped himself up. He felt... not bad, exactly. Certainly not how he would have expected to feel after being in the hospital for... _huh. I wonder how long I was out_. He thought, picking up his glasses from a table next to the hospital bed.

There were several IV racks set up next to his bed, but none of them presently held anything. Beyond that, the room was strangely bare, lacking the computerized equipment he would have expected to see in such a room.

Suddenly, the door opened. "Oh, Ars! You're awake?" Ars did a double take. It was Melissa, and she was talking to him like he was an actual human being, a complete one-eighty from her behavior toward him in the previous months.

"Anyway," she continued, oblivious to his surprise, "I wanted to check in on you before I go to pick up the new pilots. You were in pretty bad shape when you came in. Guess you really went up to eleven on that spinal tap facing off against the battlecruiser."

"New pilots?" Ars said, his voice soft. "I guess I screwed up then," he looked down. "I'm sorry I couldn't get that battlecruiser. I guess I should be glad I didn't fail badly enough to kill the program."

Melissa sprang forward, grabbing his shoulder and pushing him upright. "_No!_ You didn't screw up _at all_. You did better than anyone expected. Marcus flew to St. Louis after the battle and used your victory to get Congress to double our funding and give us the money to bring the remaining Eladrin units to operational status."

"So," Ars said, still somewhat confused by Melissa's behavior, "Will the other pilots be kids, like me?"

"Afraid so. An adult can't properly make the connection." Melissa said, voice hardening abruptly. "Oh, that reminds me," she said, her voice returning to what it had been for the rest of the conversation. She held out a small black, velvet-lined box "They decided to give you this."

Ars took the box and flipped it open. Inside was a pair of epaulettes, each consisting of a pair of vertical silver bars.

"They're giving you a commission, O-3. Direct from the President himself," Melissa said. "It's something of a tradition that fighter pilots are officers, and I guess they wanted someone with the rank to be flight leader."

"_I'm_ flight leader?"

(X)

**Phoenix Engineering Department**

"So, Commander, glad you could make it down here, sir." Raphael said, saluting Commander Marcus as he exited the elevator into the engineering department.

"Good to see you to, Raphael. How's work going on my Eladrin units?"

"Well. We moved in the last one, Amaterasu, I believe, yesterday. Salamander is going to be the first one ready. Want to see?"

The Commander grinned. He was surprisingly young for his rank and position, having been just out of college when the Fog attacked, and on occasion he seemed much younger. Raphael couldn't blame him, he was exactly the same. That was why his job was so fun.

"Follow me."

(X)

**Phoenix Fabrication Facility**

"So this," Raphael said, tapping the glass wall just under the 'PLEASE DO NOT TAP THE GLASS' sign, "is Eladrin Epsilon-7. We call it Salamander."

The massive aircraft was sitting on the floor in the center of an equally large room. Commander Marcus and Engineering Chief Raphael stood in a long hallway lined with massive windows overlooking eight such chambers. The Eladrin, Salamander, was sitting on its own legs, with only minimal supporting equipment. It was surrounded by all manner of complex equipment. Phoenix engineers, Marcus could see at least twelve, attended to the machines and performed enigmatic tasks on the exposed inner workings of the craft.

"This Eladrin is specialized in directed energy weapons." Raphael said. He pointed at the partially striped wings of the craft. "It carries a pair of heavy lasers, one mounted under each wing. Of course, the real beauty," he continued, pointing at the nose of the craft, "is the energy projector swivel mounted behind the nose. Most powerful weapon we've developed, though it has some problems."

"Like what?" Marcus said, frowning. "I hope that-"

"It's not that bad." Raphael assured. "Essentially, we had to build the Eladrin around it. The power draw necessitated an oversized reactor, which is the main thing. Once we had all that power available, though, that made the lasers an excellent choice for the wings, and also allowed us to upgrade the engine."

"What's the catch?" Marcus muttered.

"Well, we ran into some problems with heat management. That was what shelved this model. However we've solved that, but it required us to replace some of the armor with radiative plating, which hurt the durability of the craft. We upgraded the Tesseract Field and the point defense a bit to compensate, but it's still something to consider."

"And when will it be operational?"

"Three weeks, maximum. Sooner if we get more personnel."

"I'll see what I can do. We've got plenty of money, but finding qualified people who we can clear, and can _trust_, to work on this stuff has been the bane of this organization for the past fifteen years."

"I know that," Raphael sighed. "Anyway, if you direct your attention to the window behind you, you will see Eladrin Gamma-5, Leviathan."

Marcus turned and looked down into the second engineering bay. Like the previous one, it contained a massive Eladrin surrounded by heavy equipment. The similarities ended there. This Eladrin was massive, at least twenty or thirty feet longer than any of the others, and had been stripped down far more than the first, with several cavities open to give access to the inner workings of the craft. Several engineers had their head and shoulders hidden in the craft, and one man had everything above his waist hidden inside the aircraft.

"In any case, this was the first one we built that was actually approved for combat. It was initially built to carry big guns, small artillery pieces really. However, no conventional weapon we could realistically mount on an aircraft could do any damage against the Fog, so this model was shelved. Now that we have the Starlight Rifles and HVMs, though..."

"Leviathan grew fangs."

"Exactly. And this one is a real monster. _Five_, count 'em, five, HVM launchers, two 105mm Starlight Rifles on side Swivel mounts, and a centerline Ordnance Hypervelocity Missile launcher. Beyond that, it was built with ceramic armor, not the nano mix we use today. We are in the process of refitting it at the same thickness, which will make this thing a pain to kill. It also projects a Maxwell-Tesseract Field much stronger than any of the other Eladrin units, though it needs that, given its comparatively inferior maneuvering abilities. This one should be operational in a month."

Marcus smiled.

(X)

**Phoenix HQ**

The doctors let Ars out of the infirmary about midday. He'd subsisted entirely off of IV drips for the past three days, and so he was understandably ravenous. Given that Melissa was still out collecting the new pilots, he felt relatively safe going to the central mess hall to find something to eat. He went to his quarters and changed out of the hospital robes into the Uniform of the Day, then made his way to the mess. He only got lost once.

Entering the bustling mess after the quiet of the infirmary was like taking one of Melissa's buckets of iced brine to the face. He collected a tray, pausing briefly as a laser scanned his face. He took his tray to the buffet lines.

There didn't seem to be any particular meal or culture represented; stir-fry and roast beef were served next to the taco, omelet, and frozen yogurt stations. Ars got some of everything.

His next challenge was finding somewhere to sit. The entire sitting area was filled with black-uniformed men and women who seemed to occupy most of the provided area. Ars walked out of the buffet area carrying his tray, surveying the tables looking for somewhere to sit. He was hoping to find an unoccupied table, but it looked like-

"Ars! Why don't you sit over here?" Ars jerked around, almost dropping his tray. It was Raphael, Head of the Engineering Department.

"Um, okay," Ars muttered, making his way toward Raphael's table.

"So," Ars said, setting his food on the table and sitting down. "Odd seeing you here. Why aren't you in the Officer's Mess or down in Engineering?"

Raphael shrugged. "I prefer the vibe here, I guess. Plus, the Officer's Mess is in E Shaft, halfway across the complex from Engineering. I'm not getting much time off lately, and I'd prefer not to spend most of it walking around." He grinned. "Thanks for that, by the way."

Ars twirled some lo mein on his fork and ate it. "I don't think it was me, though, really." He said as he ate the pasta," I mean, all I did was fly the thing."

"Don't be modest." Raphael said, then held up a finger. "One second. Sometimes it feels like the rest of the department personnel are a bunch of headless puppies without me."

Raphael pulled out a slim phone, pressed a button, and raised it to his ear. "Ethan, that's stupid. The power connections on the Energy Projector need to be Perfect. That means no Design Evolution Trade Offs. Take it off the Forward Lateral Maneuvering Thrusters; with the thrust vectoring on the main engine, they don't need to be perfect. Besides, if the bird takes enough damage that the thrust vectoring doesn't work, I think the pilot would have bigger problems."

"What was that?" Ars asked, finishing his omelette.

"One of the engineers working on Salamander needed a pointer. When you're designing something, you can't have everything be perfect. Improving component or system in one respect generally hurts it in another. That holds doubly true for an aircraft, and triple for something like the Eladrin."

Ars tilted his head. "Really? Why?"

"Complex, experimental system." Raphael said, waving his hand. "Anyway, you've got to see the Energy Projector system we're installing on Salamander." He reached down, picked up a laptop case from beneath the table, and withdrew a packet of papers. "We call it the Ameliorator."

Ars raised an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Look," Raphael said, putting the paper on the table. "Power draw of 12.1 jigawatts, and an output of _far_ more than is reasonable. I won't say we strapped our first experiment in matter energization onto the front of the Eladrin; I'm almost certain I've purged all the records indicating that's the case. Basically, we energize a particle beam, then fire it in a concentrated cascade at the target. Even against a Fog Capital ship, we expect that to be noticeable."

"That's... impressive." Ars said, eating a spoonful of ice cream. "What would it have done against that battlecruiser I fought?"

"See, that's hard to say. There are actually two ways to damage a Fog ship. One is to saturate the Klein Field until it collapses. That's the normal way. The other is called 'breaking the bottom' of the Klein Bottle the Field generates. Basically, you hit it with so much energy in one place that it can't absorb it all. A Fog Superheavy Cannon would probably to that, and so would a strategic-level thermonuclear weapon. The only reason we know about the phenomena is that we had an ultra-precise gravity-measuring satellite, originally intended for earth science, in orbit at the time your father nuked the Fog."

"Yeah." Ars looked down at the multitude of mostly-empty plates at his seat. "My father."

"Anyway, the Energy Projector is designed to break the bottom of a targeted Klien Field. If the field is weak enough, or is under sufficient strain, it should be able to just smash through."

"And once that happens, it's like the Starlight Rifle writ large."

"Exactly."

(X)

**Phoenix Commander's Office**

"Alright, Tadayoshi, explain to me just what it is I'm looking at." Marcus said, examining the intelligence report.

"This is a report from one of our remaining satellites." Kuroda Tadayoshi said. The man was an old soldier, having served in the JSDF for nearly two decades before being stranded in the US when the Fog blockade came down.

'"Are you sure?" Marcus said. "Because I thought it was a blue plate of spaghetti."

Kuroda coughed. "That would be a gravitic distortion measurement. In any case, judging by the distance, speed, and magnitude of the distortions, it appears that we have multiple Fog submarines converging on two areas; San Diego and the Columbia River."

"We have submarine nets..." Marcus reminded the man.

"But they won't stop anything," Kuroda finished. He had worked with Marcus for years, almost since the founding of Phoenix, and the two thought along very similar lines. He was Phoenix's head of intelligence and Marcus' most trusted advisor.

"I suppose they want us to deploy the Eladrins to do something about it, then."

"They haven't made an official request, but yes, I would imagine that they would want something along those lines."

"They do realize that the Eladrin units aren't anything resembling ASW platforms. Most of the weapons have no ability to penetrate significant amounts of water. We built them to target surface platforms, and they know that."

"Still, after our previous performance, there is no way they can't make the request. I doubt they would go so far as to make it an actual order, but still..."

(X)

**Stephenson Farm, Ohio, Pilot Candidate Home**

"You're asking my son to do what?" Edmund Stephenson said.

Melissa, pilot candidate Isaac Stephenson, and his mother and father were sitting in the dimly lit living room of family's prosperous farmhouse.

"I represent Phoenix , the organization that has developed the Eladrin system . We need you son to pilot one." Melissa said, trying to give nothing away by her face. "You will, of course, be amply rewarded for your son's sacrifice. We will have to ask you to go into something like the Witness Protection Program, as you could become a potential target for Fog attacks. However, Phoenix could give you any sort of life you liked."

"But... why him?" Mr Stephenson asked, clearly mystified. "I understand he's almost old enough to go to war, given the situation, but give how powerful the Eladrin is, I'd think you'd want that kind of power in the hand of a reasonable adult."

"I'm sorry, but that's classified information. You can be sure there is a very good reason for it. All I can-"

"And why our son?" Felicity Stephenson said, holding back tears. "We lost one child in the bombardment, and every day I pray the damn Fog won't take another. How... how can I agree to send Issac into something like this?"

Melissa took a deep breath. She felt terrible. Of all the pilot candidates, Isaac Stephenson was the only one who had grown up in a stable family environment. That was unfortunately rare these days; Melissa was one to know about that.

"I want to do it, Mom." Isaac said. This was the first time he had spoken; he'd been quiet for most of the discussion. "If they need me, then... look, the Fog aren't just going to go away on their own, right? Someone needs to fight them."

Edmund took a deep breath. "If you want to do this, then you have my blessing. I'm very proud of you."

Melissa looked at the two of them, then back to Felicity. "I think... that your son is right. You lost a child to the Fog, but the Eladrin offers an opportunity to vastly reduce the price of a war against the Fog. We lost more than half a million soldiers in the Final Battle. How many mothers will suffer as you have in this new war if we don't have your son?"

"Then go, take him." Felicity said, beginning to sob. She looked at Isaac. "Just promise me that you'll come back to us."

(X)

Ars put down the straight bar and checked the communicator/phone thing the medical staff had asked him to carry. He had been embarrassing himself in the gym, lifting weights and going over his sword forms as Melissa implied would be good for his health.

He had one message, from Melissa.

_Inbound with new pilot. Dropping him off, need to collect next one. Show him around, just give him the same tour I gave you. That's an order, maggot._

_Huh._ Ars thought. _So Melissa must be back to normal. I guess that incident in the infirmary was just an anomaly._

(X)

The elevator hatch carrying the dropship descended from the ceiling, but this time Ars stood alongside Commander Marcus as it descended.

The platform touched down and the copilot's door on the craft opened. A tall, fair-skinned boy with rounded, noble features, and bright, fire-red hair emerged.

Ars stepped forward as he approached and held out a hand. "Hello, I'm Captain Ars Black, the first Eladrin pilot. Welcome to Phoenix."

(X)

"And this." Ars said, as the door slid open, "Is the simulator room. I've probably spent five hundred hours here in the past month and a half."

"Wow," Isaac said, said, looking at the row of five simulator machines, each several times the size of bus. "This whole base has been pretty impressive."

"I guess," Ars said. "Anyway, a lot of this is actually the neural interface gear. Then Eladrin's use a more refined system."

Isaac approached the second machine from the right wall, next to the simulator Ars had used during his training. "Wait, neural interface?"

"They didn't tell you?"

"No... Should they have?"

Ars shrugged. "In any case, it's basically a set of microneedles apparently. Two in the base of the skull and a set down the spine." He tapped the nape of his neck. "If they told anyone, don't think they'd get any recruits for this job."

Isaac looked far less disgusted than Ars had expected. "That's... impressive. Do you have to worry about your brain being hacked?"

"No, they explained it to me. Everyone's brain is unique, so it would be absurdly hard to write a brain virus, and it would have to target a single person. Plus, humans aren't machines; a virus couldn't really control you, and would fade quickly."

"Cool," Isaac grinned. "With that settled, then, can I give this thing a whirl?"

"I suppose so," Ars said with another shrug. "Simulator time is important, after all."

"Well, alright, then," Isaac said, starting to climb up the ladder to the simulator cockpit. "What scenario will we be flying?"

Ars grinned back. "Dogfight."

(X)

The two superfighters were simulated flying over the Central Pacific, with the Fog and major weather effects turned off. They were currently circling each other about twenty miles apart.

"So, I've never done this before," Isaac admitted from his position strapped in behind the simulated controls of the Salamander. "Should I be worried?"

"I've never done it before either," Ars said, focusing on his own controls, not a hint of irony in his voice. "I've minimized the control difficulty on your settings, so this is just a battle between the two of us; my superior experience controlling this thing won't matter."

"You didn't have to do that," Isaac said. "Now come at me."

Isaac broke his circling rotation, cutting toward Ars. Ars flared his engine and began to climb. Ars' HVMs had more throw weight then Isaac's lasers, but were on fixed mounts and thus very difficult to use in a dogfight. His 88mm Starlight Rifles were less powerful, but he had more of them, and they were able to rotate freely.

That was, of course, discounting the Energy Projector, but Ars doubted that would be much use in a dogfight.

Abruptly, a beam of energy split the sky below Ars. The corona from the beam was impressive, but it was still a miss. Ars began to climb in earnest, his speed dropping off as his plasma drive strained against the gravity well of earth.

A second beam of energy, though much less powerful, flickered across the area around Ars before it locked onto him. His Maxwell Field shimmered, becoming reflective as it dissipated the energy of the attack.

He rolled over, bringing his Starlight Rifles to bear. The distance had closed to only a few miles now, and Ars unleashed a barrage of superheated plasma at his rapidly approaching target.

Isaac was still at the extreme edge of the plasma weapons in their default state, but one of the bolts struck, triggering a flare in his Tesseract Field.

There was no time for Ars to consider his next move as his opponent closed, "Railguns to direct fire, anti-air mode."

As the two Eladrins shot toward each other, their railguns began to chatter. Ars watched as the integrity of his Field began to drop. The other craft was better suited for a close range joust; he couldn't win this fight. He jackknifed up, allowing his opponent to pass beneath him.

Isaac began to come around and raise his nose, but Ars had a superior position and hammered the other pilot with his Starlight Rifles. Isaac returned fire.

(X)

"So," Commander Marcus said, watching the simulated battle. "They seem to be getting along well.

"I guess," Melissa said.

The pair continued to watch in silence for several more minutes as the Eladrins continued to battle. Melissa was scheduled to be picking up the next pilot, but she figured there was enough slack built in to her schedule that it wouldn't really matter. In any event, she could go supersonic over the Great Plains for a few minutes to catch up.

The fight began to wind down to its inevitable conclusion. Ars seemed to have dragged it out. He had taken far more damage than Melissa figured he had needed to, but eventually he lined up a direct shot on the heavily damaged digital Salamander with his heavy plasma gun and ended him. Melissa had only known the second pilot for a few hours, but she had read his profile. Everything she knew about him indicated that he was the sort of person who wouldn't like being given an unfair advantage.

She wondered if Ars knew that.

(X)

Stel sat at the desk in 'her' room in the orphanage. It was a simple, if somewhat rickety, assembly of undecorated varnished wood. Really, it summarized the entire orphanage nicely.

The whole place was something that, before the appearance of the Fog, and the resulting bombardment, would have been considered badly out of place in the twenty-first century. That was then, however, when people had the privilege of living without the threat of potential annihilation hanging over them, and all the luxuries granted by trade across the seas.

That, however, was then, now was a completely different animal. The bombardment by the Fleet of Fog had created hundreds of thousands, millions even, of orphans. With the ongoing economic downturn created by the blockade, fewer people were willing to adopt than otherwise might.

To counter that, the government had been forced to foster the bombardment orphans onto just about anyone willing to sign a piece of paper, hopefully excluding anyone guilty of a major felony. Despite that it hadn't been even remotely enough and, in one of the extreme moves that rapidly became the trademark of his administration, President Viktor Antonov had re-introduced the concept of major institutional orphanages.

Somehow, Stel had ended up in one. She imagined that it was the same as the countless others in her situation; parents vaporized in a corrosive detonation, and pulled out as a bawling infant who had somehow been spared by some kind stranger or rescue worker. From there, she had been sent to one of the newly organized orphanages. At least she hadn't wound up in the refugee camps.

When she was younger, she had fantasized that she had been different. Perhaps, she had imagined, her parents had been traveling at the time and had simply lost her in the chaos. Or maybe her father had been a brave navy captain who had died gloriously fighting under Admiral Black at the Great Battle or Second Midway.

Of course, as she grew, she came to understand the improbability of such fantasies and set them aside, like her few childhood toys.

Particularly in the early years, it hadn't always been easy. The newly created 'children's homes' frequently were poorly organized, and hers had been a logistical nightmare. Stel keenly remembered the early years, the fights over the available food with the other girls; dealing with the strange, seemly random, absences of key goods.

It had been hard living with the frequent shortages of basic items. She had coped with it better than most; a fact which, when she had learned of her Russian heritage, had given her no end of amusement.

Stel had never been the biggest girl in the orphanage, but she possessed a strength that contradicted her rather average stature, something that had served her well in the occasional fights that ensued between her and some of the others. Though she would have never considered herself the most intelligent of the girls in the orphanage, she was still very clever, more so than she gave herself credit for.

As often as random items would become scarce, there were often strange bounties of similarly random items. Stel had proved herself very good at putting such items to rather creative uses. One time, when several crates of plastic cement had been delivered in lieu of any sort of shaving equipment, another girl had tried to take her carefully stockpiled collection of razor blades.

Stel had set a time and a place for the fight, poured the plastic cement across the synthetic floor, and wrapped her shoes in wax paper. When her opponent had arrived, she sprayed her with the activator for the plastic cement.

She looked back down at the history homework on the desk in front of her. It was on the East China Sea Conflict, also known as World War Three Lite, a war in 2027 that managed to involve all the various issues that had been accumulating in that part of the world for several decades.

Unfortunately, Stel knew very little about the East China Sea Conflict.

There was a quiet, hesitant knock on the doorframe. It was Diana, a quiet girl and one of Stel's roommates.

"Umm... there's someone here to see you." She said.

"Fair enough." Stel stood up, climbing out of the rickety chair and setting foot on the thin carpet that covered the floor of the room. She shook her short brown hair, which covered most of her neck, then smoothed it out with her hand.

Stel walked to the door, pausing to put on a pair of threadbare slippers. She then made her way out of the room, into the bare, whitewashed, and door lined hallway. As she walked down the two flights of stairs to the lobby, where visitors would be greeted, she wondered why anyone could have any reason for wanting to visit _her_.

She was deep enough in her thoughts that she almost walked into a tall, red-haired woman rounding the corner into the stairwell.

"Oh, excuse me," the other person said, taking a step back, then extending a hand. "I'm Melissa. I'm here representing Phoenix. You may have heard of us. Anyway, I have a proposition for you."

(X)

_It is truly amazing_, Captain Nicholas Mantle though, wrapping his fingers around the railing of a platform mounted on the forward face of the superstructure of his ship, _what man can accomplish when backed into a corner_.

His ship was a 20,000 ton _Lloyd_-class heavy cruiser, the _David Hackworth_. She was a powerful vessel, capable of carrying more the one hundred and thirty capital missiles on her integral Vertical Launch System, and carried more than twice that number of interceptors and anti-air missiles. She was also armed with nine 8.5inch hybrid propulsion main guns, mounted three each on two forward turrets and one rear turret. She was more heavily armored than anything pre-Fog, with belt and deck armor several inches thick made of the latest titanium-steel nanoalloys and ceramic 'sandwich' composite.

At present, however, the _Hackworth_ was nowhere near combat-worthy. Her main guns had been removed, along with just about everything not bolted down, not to mention a fair bit that was.

The ship was also several hundred miles from the nearest major body of water.

Nicholas looked down. Presently, his ship was resting on the back of a massive multi-kiloton crawler , a vehicle designed to carry heavy warships from the nation's shipyards, located safely in the interior of the nation along the Great Lakes, to the underground fortress-ports where the canal network didn't reach.

Currently, his ship was ordered to proceed from the lock where it had been removed from the Mississippi River Canal Network, through a pass somewhere in Colorado, then go north, to the region where Seattle had once stood.

The crawler averaged something like four miles an hour over the ground they were currently traveling.

It was going to be a _long_ trip.

(X)

Alaska sat in her favorite perch, a decorated nest in the superstructure of her ship-body. She flicked through the data reports she had gathered on the opponent she had faced.

It was a lavish space, occupying the area where the bridge of the ship had been on the battlecruiser. Bookshelves lined the room, and there was a thick carpet on the floor, a tall four-poster bed in one corner, and a massive, ornate wooden desk opposite. The room's dominant color was green, but white and gold trimmed or highlighted much of its contents.

Collecting the data, of course, had been very easy, particularly after the announcement of the Eladrin Project . She had simply scooped up everything on the human datanet related to the projected. From there, it had been easy enough to decipher the identity of the pilot of the machine which she had faced.

He was one Ars Black, the son of the great human ship master who had led the humans in their sole victory during the final battle. He had fought competently, far better than any other human in that conflict. He had used greater weapons with greater skill than any of his counterparts, and in turn achieved greater results.

It appeared that his son was cut from the same cloth. Admiral Octavius Black was dead, but Captain Ars Black was of the same blood, a descendant with potential.

_I wonder what kind of person he is_. Alaska thought, picking up the 1/100th-scale (plush) replica of the enemy 'Eladrin' she had created for intelligence purposes. _I have to find out more about him_.

The Mental Model sat like that for a while, pondering the nature of her enemy.

(X)

Eric Glenn leaned back in his plastic 'classroom' chair. He really hadn't expected the sheer volume of academic work involved with becoming a crewmember on a tank that outweighed most destroyers.

He was in a long room, cut from the stone above The Forge. With bare whitewashed cinderblock walls and a tile floor, its decoration was spartan, but that was a step up from the bare stone common in the underground manufacturing base. Long tables lined the long sides of the room with computer workstations at regular intervals, each one with a hopeful HORUS gun crewmember seated in front of it.

Currently, there were seven HORUS guns in various stages of construction. Each one needed a crew of twenty-one; a commander, a driver, a navigator, a gunner, two gun techs, five engineers, three reactor techs, five secondary weapons operators, a radioman, and a radar operator, so there were enough slots for most of the selected candidates. However, competition over who would be place where was fierce.

Overall, though, the project was going well.

(X)

"So," Kalar inquired, "What do you think of the new pilots?"

"I'm not sure." Security Chief Elizabeth. "I mean, the first one was alright, I suppose, but it's a bit early to tell on these new ones. I still have doubts about the first one, to be honest."

The pair was currently walking through a major hallway, dubbed the 'Grand Concourse', in J shaft. It had a higher ceiling than many halls in the base which, when combined with the gentle panel lighting, made it almost possible to forget that you were underground.

"What do you mean?"

"I... I'm not sure, exactly. Something about him just seems a little bit..." The Security Chief put a hand on her forehead and began twirling her hair around her finger. She was an extremely well-endowed woman of medium height with brown hair and dark, hard eyes.

"Well," Kalar continued, "we do have a psychologist on staff. That should help."

Kalar sighed, keying open a door. "I am a doctor. Nominally, at least. I picked up enough brain... stuff in med school to know we can't really hope for _normal_ with these kids. We're looking for _very_ uncommon traits within a small, exceptional portion of an inherently unstable section of the population."

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. "Brain stuff. You fill me with confidence. Anyway, the second kid, Isaac, seems ok, but the other one, Stel, I think, seems a bit... disturbed. Not like the sort of person that needs to be commanding the destructive firepower of an Eladrin."

Kalar grinned. "I disagree. Have you read her profile?"

"Yes."

"Did you check some of the attached incident reports?"

"No," Elizabeth said, sighing. "I've been rather busy this past week since the first mission. We've had a massive influx of new people, and vetting them has been a bitch."

"Well, in any case," Kalar said, "some of the ways she dealt with the other girls there were... impressive. I think she's _exactly_ the sort of person we need controlling an Eladrin."

(X)

"You know, when I took this job." Isaac said, wiping sweat off his brow, "I expected glorious combat against the enemies of mankind. Sure, I figured there would be a fair degree of personal danger, and brutal training would be par for the course."

Isaac put the massive crate he was lifting down on the cart. "But manual labor? If I wanted that, I would have stayed home."

The three pilots had been assigned to help move a variety of items from one of the Engineering storage chambers, a large room in the bowels of the underground Phoenix headquarters. In this chamber, the white walls and tiled floors common in the base had given way to bare concrete and metal walls.

Metal tracks for the variety of powered carts used to move cargo criss-crossed the floor, like a twisted reflection of the grid of metal rafter bars on the ceiling. Given the room's lack of use, and thus low priority for climate control, and its proximity to the heavy machinery of the fabrication center, it was oppressively hot.

"Your home is gone." Ars said, grunting as he picked up a crate. "Tragically, some villain detonated a massive ammonium nitrate fuel oil bomb on your farm. There wasn't enough left of the Stephenson Family to fill my cocoa mug."

"You're hilarious," Isaac muttered.

"I find this rather pleasant." Stel said. "After all, it's not as if we have to do this all day."

"That doesn't change the fact that we still have to move that." Ars said, pointing his finger at the one remaining item the pilots had been tasked to move.

The item in question was a large piece of fabrication equipment, a heavy prototyper cage. It was large enough for Ars to stand or sit comfortably in it, were it empty. With the various other pieces of equipment in it, it was much heavier than he was.

"It's too heavy to just move," Stel said, "Let alone lift onto the cart platform."

"I think we need a plan. We have these drones," Ars said, tapping one of the drones with his foot, "let's use them."

Isaac shook his head. "They're too stupid. Let's just lift it."

It was true. Verbally instructing the drone was a painstaking process, and the team lacked any of the computer equipment needed to instruct them the old-fashioned way. The flat-topped drones could carry a massive load, but that was useless it you couldn't get them to do what you wanted them to.

Stel had wandered over to the far wall, and appeared to be examining something hanging from it. "We have also have these poles," she said, holding up a long metal rod.

"Fine." Isaac said, crossing his arms. "We'll do it your way. Where do you want me?"

Ars swallowed. "I'm not sure, exactly. What if we-"

"The way you spoke implied you had a plan." Stel said. "You're confusing me."

"I don't see why we don't just try to lift the thing." Isaac muttered. Then he raised his voice. "Stel, come help me with this."

Ars watched as his two fellow 'pilots' tried, and failed, to lift the heavy cage. He knew this would happen. Why couldn't they have listened to him? Stel hadn't done _anything_ related to The Program, and neither of them had ever _touched_ an Eladrin. Their units weren't even finished.

As his comrades strained, it dawned on Ars that he was, in fact, their commanding officer. He could just _order_ them to help him. That would solve all of his problems.

Still, he needed a plan first. Simple machine were useful to move large objects. _What could I use here...?_ Ars through back to the emergency prep section of the Engineering Orientation. He walked over to the response kit mounted on the wall, entered a non-emergency use on the pad mounted next to him.

_Where... there it is_! Ars grabbed a coil of composite fiber robe, intended to be used to remove debris from a trapped worker, and a pair of magnetic grappling clamps.

He took a deep breath. "Isaac! Stel! Help me move this thing. That's an order."

Isaac turned toward him and raised an eyebrow. "Order? You aren't Commander Marcus. I don't remember hearing anything about listening to you."

Stel turned to face him as well. "I agree."

"You should listen to me because I'm a Captain and you don't have any rank. That means I'm in charge."

"You said it yourself." Isaac shot back. "We don't have ranks. We're not part of the military yet."

"No, if you want to help, then try to get this stupid drone to do something," Isaac said, kicking a drone hovering near his feet, which took off across the floor.

Ars' arms began to shake. He suppressed the reaction, an act which took conscious effort. They hated him. _I should have known they would have,_ he thought, turning away from the other two. _After all, what else could I have expected_?

Ars stalked past the other two, who were now attempting to coax a drone to stand by next to the cage, presumably to slip under once they had lifted it. Carefully avoiding looking either of the in the eye, Ars climb the three bottom horizontal bars of the cage like rungs on a ladder, then quickly attached the rope to the magnetic clap, and then secured the clamp to the top of the cage.

He attached the other end of the rope to the second clamp, then tossed it over one of the bars on the ceiling. Hoping to the ground, he grabbed the dangling magnetic clap and he walked over to the wall, where he looped it through a heavy metal bracket protruding from the wall horizontal to the ground.

"Drone, here." Ars said firmly, pointing at the nearest drone and jerking his arm toward himself. "Maximize traction," he said, kneeling down and attaching the magnetic clamp to the back to the drone, "Pull load, that direction."

The drone extended several outrigger wheels, and began to move forward. However, before it had moved more than a few inches, the rope grew taught and the drone's wheels began to skip on the floor.

Ars stared at it for a moment in dismay. He heard footsteps. Ars looked up. It was Isaac, carrying one of the heavy boxes.

"What do you-" He began, only for Isaac to cut him off.

"I'm here to help." Isaac said. "You need more traction." He set the box down on the back of the drone

Stel walked over, also carrying a box. She put in down on the robot, and its wheels began to gain some actual traction.

"Get another drone over here." Isaac said, "They can link together to increase their pulling power."

Several minutes later, five drones, loaded with a significant fraction of the crates, had been linked together in a star pattern. Slowly, they began to strain forward, and the prototyper began to rise.

"Come on," Ars urged, his anger evaporated. "Guys, I think its going to-"

There was a sudden groaning sound of stressed metal, then, before any of the pilots could react, the screech of tearing steel.

Ars whirled around in terror. The bracket on the wall was bending, deforming. Something was trickling down the wall underneath it. It was-

The metal _tore_, ripping free of its anchors and flying across the room. It shot toward Isaac, tumbling through the air, and dealt a glancing blow to Isaac's head. He dropped

From where the bracket had anchored, a frothy torrent of liquid began to gush into the room.

Simultaneously, the prototyper cage, which had rose to nearly a foot in the air, dropped, landed on an edge and, in what felt like painfully slow motion, fell on its side.

Ars rushed to Isaac's side, but Stel wave him off. She didn't speak, but Ars understood the look she gave him.

_I've done enough already._

(X)

Alaska waited on the prow of her ship-body, watching the flotilla of approaching ships. The group was led by the Assault and Suppression Vessel Saratoga, and also contained the heavy cruiser Seydlitz, who was permanently assigned as her protector, and a handful of light cruisers and destroyers too small to be able to project their own mental models.

She sighed. Arizona was also approaching the rendezvous point, on a different vector. She had avoided the flagship ever their conversation after the encounter with the Eladrin.

The distant group of ships closed began to slow as they closed. Alaska was still rather ashamed of her conduct in the battle. The Flagship had made cognizant points about her performance, but she did wonder what she could have done better, other than not focusing on the Eladrin.

It took only a few minutes for the Assault and Suppression Vessel to reach Alaska, her attending heavy cruiser trailing only a few hundred yards behind and to the side. Waves broke over the bow of the flattop and crashed on the side of the ship as it pulled up alongside her.

A shadow fell across the deck as the massive Suppression Vessel slowed to a stop on Alaska's starboard side, the golden traceries across her hull pulsing as the ship applied its massive gravity engines to overcome its immense inertia.

Behind it, the heavy cruiser Seydlitz began its own turn, its gunmetal Fog patterns, which were more geometric than those of any ship Alaska had ever seen, radiated a more steady light as the rear starboard quarter of the ship seemed to lift into the air.

The prow of the Seydlitz was driven down into the water as it applied engine power perpendicular to its keel. A massive wave of water rose into the air, sparking in the sunlight for a moment before it fell into Saratoga's shadow.

And then onto Alaska's head.

As Alaska rubbed the salt out of her eyes and applied her Klien Field to her clothes, the Seydlitz came to a stop at a right angle to Alaska and Saratoga, very nearly touching the hull of the larger Suppression vessel.

At about the same time, the Flagship pulled to a stop on the other side of Saratoga. Abruptly, a long gangway shot out from the top deck of flattop and hammered into the deck with a resounding clang, a pair of spikes extending into the hull material to anchor it in place.

It was a signal, and none too subtle, to board the larger vessel. Alaska, still slightly damp, made her way up the plank, hands out to steady herself.

Alaska made her way to the top of the gangplank, breathing a sigh of relief as she stepped onto the stable main deck of the massive vessel, then began to survey her surroundings.

On the other side of the flight deck, near the command tower, the red-haired mental model of the Flagship also boarded the ASV. Elsewhere, the flight deck was empty. The pair of elevators at the center of the deck sat in their elevated positions, flush with the deck. Alaska slipped one of her shoes off and ran a toe over the deck material, flush with the apparent grain of the 'wood'. As she expected, it had the metallic texture common of Fog nanomaterials, with the chill expected on a ship in the North Pacific.

Slipping her shoe back on, Alaska began to run across the flight deck toward where the other two Mental Models were gathering. From the bow of the ship, she spotted another mental model walking across the deck. The fourth model drew closer and as she closed Alaska began to be able to discern her features.

The new Model, Seydlitz, was tall, with blond hair somewhat shorter than Alaska's own. She had bright blue eyes, and also appeared to be extremely well-endowed. That bothered Alaska a bit for some reason, but she wasn't sure why. If she wanted-

"Alaska!" The Mental Model talking with Arizona, who Alaska now saw was somewhat shorter than the Flagship, turned toward her.

"Ah, Alaska." Arizona said, turning toward Alaska and putting her hand on her hip. "We were just talking about you."

Saratoga turned toward Alaska, who looked over the first Assault and Suppression Vessel Mental Model she had met. The top of Saratoga's head only came up around the middle of Alaska's chest. The girl, it was hard to think of her any other way, had bright blue hair, with equally bright green eyes.

"Hello, Alaska," Saratoga said, nodding. "Flagship Arizona was just explaining to me about your encounter with this new human battle system."

Alaska held up her hands. "Well... see... the thing you have to consider is-"

Saratoga laughed. "Oh no, I think you did quite well. After all, Arizona said we've never even heard of this new type of enemy."

"Heh heh... yea." Alaska blink twice, then decided to try changing the subject.

"So, um, as an Assault and Suppression Vessel, what exactly would your capabilities be?"

"That's classified."

Alaska and Arizona turned toward the new speaker. It was the tall, buxom blonde from before, who walked toward the knot of taking ships with a quick confident stride, a harsh expression on her face.

"I apologize," She said, "But on order of the Supreme Flagship of the Pacific Theater, the exact abilities of an Assault Ship have been placed under seal, pending strategic necessity."

"I see." Alaska said, frowning. That really didn't make any sense at all. "So," she said, smiling, "Who are you?"

"I am designated Heavy Cruiser Seydlitz," she said, "Detached on permanent service as _Singulare_ to Assault and Suppression Vessel Saratoga. I also-"

"Um, people, I'm picking something up."

"What is it?" Arizona said, her voice urgent. "Is it-"

"No." Saratoga said, "It's-"

With a roar, something _massive_ broke the surface of the water. The prow of a ship. It continued upwards, water cascading off its turrets and gantries. Alaska craned her neck, watching as the massive ship rose hundreds of feet into the air. Something detached from the top, just as the upward motion of the ship ceased.

In what seemed like slow motion, the front half of the vessel plummeted down toward the ocean, drawing the stern out of the water until, with a tremendous noise, it hit, sending a massive fountain of water into the sky.

A figure landed on the deck in a three-point landing, a laptop held under one folded arm. The Mental Model, for it could be nothing else, wore a sleek grey leotard the color of an overcast sky hiding a bright sun, the same as the Fog patterns on her hull.

"Ladies and gentlemen," she said, looking up at the Flagship. "Iowa is here."


End file.
